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Olbers’ Hypothesis: The Origin of the Asteroids

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Abstract

Within weeks of the discovery of the second asteroid Pallas, on March 28, 1802, Wilhelm Olbers (Fig. 1.1) in Bremen had formulated an idea to explain the existence of the asteroids. It was, in the words of the English lecturer on natural philosophy George C. Carey (1825:34), “a very romantic idea, namely, that the recently discovered planets might be fragments of a planet, which had been burst asunder by some internal convulsion.”

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    Clifford J. Cunningham

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Cunningham, C.J. (2017). Olbers’ Hypothesis: The Origin of the Asteroids. In: Investigating the Origin of the Asteroids and Early Findings on Vesta. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58118-7_1

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