Structure of the Solar System Cambridge （太阳系的结构剑桥）.pdfVIP

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-57597-3 - Solar System Dynamics Carl D. Murray and Stanley F. Dermott Excerpt More information 1 Structure of the Solar System There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls; William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, V, i 1.1 Introduction It is a laudable human pursuit to try to perceive order out of the apparent ran- domness of nature; science is, after all, an attempt to make sense of the world around us. Moving against the background of the “fixed” stars, the regularity of the Moon and planets demanded a dynamical explanation. The history of astronomy is the history of a growing awareness of our posi- tion (or lack of it) in the universe. Observing, exploring, and ultimately under- standing our solar system is the first step towards understanding the rest of the universe. The key discovery in this process was Newton’s formulation of the uni- versal law of gravitation; this made sense of the orbits of planets, satellites, and comets, and their future motion could be predicted: The Newtonian universe was a deterministic system. The Voyager missions increased our knowledge of the outer solar system by several orders of magnitude, and yet they would not have been possible without knowledge of Newton’s laws and their conse- quences. However, advances in mathematics and computer technolo