New answers tagged astronomy
1
Concerning the note "About the frequency of optical double stars", i think that Gauss attempted to solve in this note a kind of probabilistic problem that is relevant to astronomy. Gauss tries to find a pattern in the most updated maps of stars up to his time - what is the fraction of double stars in a ball (sphere with volume) centred at the earth, among a ...
5
No, they did not. Several methods were proposed but they do not give "correct" distances. Of course, all depends on the exact meaning of the word "measure" and "correct". But their estimates were orders of magnitude away from the true numbers.
Some details are given here:
Historical knowledge of Distance of Earth from Sun
and also here the related ...
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