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The earliest forms of these symbols appear in Greek papyrus texts of late antiquity. The Byzantine codices in which many Greek papyrus texts were preserved continued and extended the inventory of astronomical symbols. [2] [3] New symbols have been invented to represent many planets and minor planets discovered in the 18th to the 21st centuries.
The origins of the planetary symbols can be found in the attributes given to classical deities. The Roman planisphere of Bianchini (2nd century, currently in the Louvre, inv. Ma 540) [2] shows the seven planets represented by portraits of the seven corresponding gods, each a bust with a halo and an iconic object or dress, as follows: Mercury has a caduceus and a winged cap; Venus has a ...
In a letter to Herschel, Lalande described it as "un globe surmonté par la première lettre de votre nom" ("a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name"). [9] After Neptune was discovered, the Bureau des Longitudes proposed the name Neptune and the familiar trident for the planet's symbol, though at bottom may be either a cross or an ...
In astronomy, planetary transits and occultations occur when a planet passes in front of another object, as seen by an observer.The occulted object may be a distant star, but in rare cases it may be another planet, in which case the event is called a mutual planetary occultation or mutual planetary transit, depending on the relative apparent diameters of the objects.
The symbols for Jupiter and Saturn are identified as monograms of the initial letters of the corresponding Greek names, and the symbol for Mercury is a stylized caduceus. [ 13 ] A. S. D. Maunder finds antecedents of the planetary symbols in earlier sources, used to represent the gods associated with the classical planets.
The Greek alphabet was the model for various others: [8] Most of the Iron Age alphabets of Asia Minor were adopted around the same time, as the early Greek alphabet was adopted from the Phoenician. The Lydian and Carian alphabets are generally believed to derive from the Greek alphabet, although it is not clear which variant is the direct ancestor.
All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi (Ξ) was used only in a subgroup of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel /u, ū/.
For instance, for a large portion of names ending in -s, the oblique stem and therefore the English adjective changes the -s to a -d, -t, or -r, as in Mars–Martian, Pallas–Palladian and Ceres–Cererian; [note 1] occasionally an -n has been lost historically from the nominative form, and reappears in the oblique and therefore in the English ...