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Vulcan was a theorized planet that some pre-20th century astronomers thought existed in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. Speculation about, and even purported observations of, intermercurial bodies or planets date back to the beginning of the 17th century. The case for their probable existence was bolstered by the support of the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, who had predicted the existence of Neptune using disturbances in the orbit of Uranus. By 1859 he had confirmed unexplained peculiarities in Mercury's orbit and predicted that they had to be the result of the gravitational influence of another unknown nearby planet or series of asteroids. A French amateur astronomer's report that he had observed an object passing in front of the Sun that same year led Le Verrier to announce that the long sought after planet, which he gave the name Vulcan, had been discovered at last. Many searches were conducted for Vulcan over the following decades, but despite several claimed observations, its existence could not be confirmed. The need for the planet as an explanation for Mercury's orbital peculiarities was later rendered unnecessary when Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity showed that Mercury's departure from an orbit predicted by Newtonian physics was explained by effects arising from the curvature of spacetime caused by the Sun's mass. Theories and observations Celestial bodies interior to the orbit of Mercury had been hypothesized, searched for, and even claimed as having been observed, for centuries. Claims of actually seeing objects passing in front of the Sun included those made by the German astronomer Christoph Scheiner in 1611 (which turned out to be the discovery of sunspots), British lawyer, writer and amateur astronomer Capel Lofft's observations of 'an opaque body traversing the sun's disc' on 6 January 1818, and Bavarian physician and astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen's 26 June 1819 report of seeing "two small spots...on the Sun, round, black and unequal in size". German astronomer J. W. Pastorff reported many observations also claiming to have seen two spots, with the first observation on 23 October 1822 and subsequent observations in 1823, 1834, 1836, and 1837; in 1834 the larger spot was recorded as 3 arcseconds across, and the smaller 1.25 arcseconds. Theories that there could be planets orbiting inside Mercury's orbit were put forward by British scientist Thomas Dick in 1838: 264  and by French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Jacques Babinet in 1846 who suggested there may be "incandescent clouds of a planetary kind, circling the Sun" and proposed the name "Vulcan" (after the god Vulcan from Roman mythology) for a planet close to the Sun.: 156  As a planet near the Sun would be lost in its glare, several observers mounted systematic searches to try to catch it during "transit", i.e. when it passes in front of the Sun's disc. German amateur astronomer Heinrich Schwabe searched unsuccessfully on every clear day from 1826 to 1843 and Yale scientist Edward Claudius Herrick conducted observations twice daily starting in 1847, hoping to catch a planet in transit.: 264  French physician and amateur astronomer Edmond Modeste Lescarbault began searching the Sun's disk in 1853, and more systematically after 1858, with a 3.75 inch (95 mm) refractor in an observatory he set up outside his surgery.: 146  Le Verrier's prediction In 1840, François Arago, the director of the Paris Observatory, suggested to mathematician Urbain Le Verrier that he work on the topic of Mercury's orbit around the Sun. The goal of this study was to construct a model based on Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. By 1843, Le Verrier published his provisional theory regarding Mercury's motion, with a detailed presentation published in 1845, which would be tested during a transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun in 1848. Predictions from Le Verrier's theory failed to match the observations. Despite this, Le Verrier continued his work and, in 1859, published a more thorough study of Mercury's motion. This was based on a series of meridian observations of the planet and 14 transits. This study's rigor meant that any differences between the motion predicted and what was observed would point to the influence of an unknown factor. Indeed, some discrepancies remained. During Mercury's orbit, its perihelion advances by a small amount, something called perihelion precession. The observed value exceeds the classical mechanics prediction by the small amount of 43 arcseconds per century. Le Verrier postulated that the excess precession could be explained by the presence of some unidentified object or objects inside the orbit of Mercury. He calculated that it was either another Mercury size planet or, since it was unlikely that astronomers were failing to see such a large object, an unknown asteroid belt near the Sun. The fact that Le Verrier had predicted the existence of the planet Neptune in 1846 using the same techniques lent veracity to his claim. Claimed discovery On 22 December 1859, Le Verrier received a letter from Lescarbault, saying that he had seen a transit of the hypothetical planet on March 26 of that year. Le Verrier took the train to the village of Orgères-en-Beauce, some 70 kilometres (43 mi) southwest of Paris, to Lescarbault's homemade observatory. Le Verrier arrived unannounced and proceeded to interrogate the man. Lescarbault described in detail how, on 26 March 1859, he observed a small black dot on the face of the Sun. After some time had passed, he realized that it was moving. He thought it looked similar to the transit of Mercury which he had observed in 1845. He estimated the distance it had already traveled, made some measurements of its position and direction of motion and, using an old clock and a pendulum with which he took his patients' pulses, estimated the total duration of the transit (coming up with 1 hour, 17 minutes, and 9 seconds). Le Verrier was not happy about Lescarbault's crude equipment but was satisfied the physician had seen the transit of a previously unknown planet. On 2 January 1860 he announced the discovery of the new planet with the proposed name from mythology, "Vulcan", at the meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Lescarbault, for his part, was awarded the Légion d'honneur and invited to appear before numerous learned societies. Not everyone accepted the veracity of Lescarbault's "discovery", however. An eminent French astronomer, Emmanuel Liais, who was working for the Brazilian government in Rio de Janeiro in 1859, claimed to have been studying the surface of the Sun with a telescope twice as powerful as Lescarbault's at the very moment that Lescarbault said he observed his mysterious transit. Liais, therefore, was "in a condition to deny, in the most positive manner, the passage of a planet over the sun at the time indicated". Based on Lescarbault's "transit", Le Verrier computed Vu.... Discover the John C Barentine popular books. Find the top 100 most popular John C Barentine books.