In the Hipparchian, Ptolemaic, and Copernican systems of astronomy, the epicycle (, meaning "circle moving on another circle") was a geometric model used to explain the variations in speed and direction of the apparent motion of the Moon, Sun, and planets. In particular it explained the apparent retrograde motion of the five planets known at the time. Secondarily, it also explained changes in the apparent distances of the planets from the Earth.
The model is often attributed to Apollonius of Perga, who was active at the end of the 3rd century BC. It was developed by Apollonius of Perga and Hipparchus of Rhodes, who used it extensively, during the 2nd century BC, then formalized and extensively used by Ptolemy in his 2nd century AD astronomical treatise the Almagest.
Epicyclical motion is used in the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical device, for compensating for the elliptical orbit of the Moon, moving faster at perigee and slower at apogee than circular orbits would, using four gears, two of them engaged in an eccentric way that quite closely approximates Kepler's second law.
Epicycles were highly accurate at predicting apparent planetary motion, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favor with the discovery that planetary motions are largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions.
Introduction
In both Hipparchian and Ptolemaic systems, the planets are assumed to move in a small circle called an epicycle, which in turn moves along a larger circle called a deferent (Ptolemy himself described the point but did not give it a nameSee page 21 of the Introduction in ). Both circles rotate eastward and are roughly parallel to the plane of the Sun's apparent orbit under those systems (ecliptic). Despite the fact that the system is considered geocentric, neither of the circles were centered on the earth, rather each planet's motion was centered at a planet-specific point slightly away from the Earth called the eccentric. The orbits of planets in this system are similar to epitrochoids, but are not exactly epitrochoids because the angle of the epicycle is not a linear function of the angle of the deferent.
In the Hipparchian system the epicycle rotated and revolved along the deferent with uniform motion. However, Ptolemy found that he could not reconcile that with the Babylonian observational data available to him; in particular, the shape and size of the apparent retrogrades differed. The angular rate at which the epicycle traveled was not constant unless he measured it from another point which is now called the equant (Ptolemy did not give it a name). It was the angular rate at which the deferent moved around the point midway between the equant and the Earth (the eccentric) that was constant; the epicycle center swept out equal angles over equal times only when viewed from the equant. It was the use of equants to decouple uniform motion from the center of the circular deferents that distinguished the Ptolemaic system. For the outer planets, the angle between the center of the epicycle and the planet was the same as the angle between the Earth and the Sun.
Ptolemy did not predict the relative sizes of the planetary deferents in the Almagest. All of his calculations were done with respect to a normalized deferent, considering a single case at a time. This is not to say that he believed the planets were all equidistant, but he had no basis on which to measure distances, except for the Moon. He generally ordered the planets outward from the Earth based on their orbit periods. Later he calculated their distances in the Planetary Hypotheses and summarized them in the first column of this table:
+ Ptolemy's estimates of orbit sizes Body Mean size (in Earth radii) Modern value (semimajor axis, in Earth radii) Ratio (modern/Ptolemy) Ratio (modern/Ptolemy, normalized to Sun = 1) Moon 48 60.3 1.26 0.065 Mercury 115 9,090 79.0 4.1 Venus 622.5 16,980 27.3 1.4 Sun 1,210 23,480 19.4 1 Mars 5,040 35,780 7.10 0.37 Jupiter 11,504 122,200 10.6 0.55 Saturn 17,026 225,000 13.2 0.68 Star shell 20,000
Had his values for deferent radii relative to the Earth–Sun distance been more accurate, the epicycle sizes would have all approached the Earth–Sun distance. Although all the planets are considered separately, in one peculiar way they were all linked: the lines drawn from the body through the epicentric center of all the planets were all parallel, along with the line drawn from the Sun to the Earth along which Mercury and Venus were situated. That means that all the bodies revolve in their epicycles in lockstep with Ptolemy's Sun (that is, they all have exactly a one-year period).
Babylonian observations showed that for superior planets the planet would typically move through in the night sky slower than the stars. Each night the planet appeared to lag a little behind the stars, in what is called prograde motion. Near opposition, the planet would appear to reverse and move through the night sky faster than the stars for a time in retrograde motion before reversing again and resuming prograde. Epicyclic theory, in part, sought to explain this behavior.
The inferior planets were always observed to be near the Sun, appearing only shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset. Their apparent retrograde motion occurs during the transition between evening star into morning star, as they pass between the Earth and the Sun.
History When ancient astronomers viewed the sky, they saw the Sun, Moon, and stars moving overhead in a regular fashion. Babylonians did celestial observations, mainly of the Sun and Moon as a means of recalibrating and preserving timekeeping for religious ceremonies. Other early civilizations such as the Greeks had thinkers like Thales of Miletus, the first to document and predict a solar eclipse (585 BC), or Heraclides Ponticus. They also saw the "wanderers" or "planetai" (our planets). The regularity in the motions of the wandering bodies suggested that their positions might be predictable.
The most obvious approach to the problem of predicting the motions of the heavenly bodies was simply to map their positions against the star field and then to fit mathematical functions to the changing positions.For an example of the complexity of the problem, see The introduction of better celestial measurement instruments, such as the introduction of the gnomon by Anaximander, allowed the Greeks to have a better understanding of the passage of time, such as the number of days in a year and the length of seasons, which are indispensable for astronomic measurements.
The ancients worked from a geocentric perspective for the simple reason that the Earth was where they stood and observed the sky, and it is the sky which appears to move while the ground seems still and steady underfoot. Some Greek astronomers (e.g., Aristarchus of Samos) speculated that the planets (Earth included) orbited the Sun, but the optics (and the specific mathematics – Isaac Newton's law of gravitation for example) necessary to provide data that would convincingly support the heliocentric model did not exist in Ptolemy's time and would not come around for over fifteen hundred years after his time. Furthermore, Aristotelian physics was not designed with these sorts of calculations in mind, and Aristotle's philosophy regarding the heavens was entirely at odds with the concept of heliocentrism. It was not until Galileo Galilei observed the moons of Jupiter on 7 January 1610, and the phases of Venus in September 1610, that the heliocentric model began to receive broad support among astronomers, who also came to accept the notion that the planets are individual worlds orbiting the Sun (that is, that the Earth is a planet, too). Johannes Kepler formulated his three laws of planetary motion, which describe the orbits of the planets in the Solar System to a remarkable degree of accuracy utilizing a system that employs elliptical rather than circular orbits. Kepler's three laws are still taught today in university physics and astronomy classes, and the wording of these laws has not changed since Kepler first formulated them four hundred years ago.
The apparent motion of the heavenly bodies with respect to time is cyclical in nature. Apollonius of Perga (3rd century BC) realized that this cyclical variation could be represented visually by small circular orbits, or epicycles, revolving on larger circular orbits, or deferents. Hipparchus (2nd century BC) calculated the required orbits. Deferents and epicycles in the ancient models did not represent orbits in the modern sense, but rather a complex set of circular paths whose centers are separated by a specific distance in order to approximate the observed movement of the celestial bodies.
Claudius Ptolemy refined the deferent-and-epicycle concept and introduced the equant as a mechanism that accounts for velocity variations in the motions of the planets. The empirical methodology he developed proved to be extraordinarily accurate for its day and was still in use at the time of Copernicus and Kepler. A heliocentric model is not necessarily more accurate as a system to track and predict the movements of celestial bodies than a geocentric one when considering strictly circular orbits. A heliocentric system would require more intricate systems to compensate for the shift in reference point. It was not until Kepler's proposal of elliptical orbits that such a system became increasingly more accurate than a mere epicyclical geocentric model.
Owen Gingerich describes a planetary conjunction that occurred in 1504 and was apparently observed by Copernicus. In notes bound with his copy of the Alfonsine Tables, Copernicus commented that "Mars surpasses the numbers by more than two degrees. Saturn is surpassed by the numbers by one and a half degrees." Using modern computer programs, Gingerich discovered that, at the time of the conjunction, Saturn indeed lagged behind the tables by a degree and a half and Mars led the predictions by nearly two degrees. Moreover, he found that Ptolemy's predictions for Jupiter at the same time were quite accurate. Copernicus and his contemporaries were therefore using Ptolemy's methods and finding them trustworthy well over a thousand years after Ptolemy's original work was published.
When Copernicus transformed Earth-based observations to heliocentric coordinates,One volume of De Revolutionibus was devoted to a description of the trigonometry used to make the transformation between geocentric and heliocentric coordinates. he was confronted with an entirely new problem. The Sun-centered positions displayed a cyclical motion with respect to time but without retrograde loops in the case of the outer planets. In principle, the heliocentric motion was simpler but with new subtleties due to the yet-to-be-discovered elliptical shape of the orbits. Another complication was caused by a problem that Copernicus never solved: correctly accounting for the motion of the Earth in the coordinate transformation. In keeping with past practice, Copernicus used the deferent/epicycle model in his theory but his epicycles were small and were called "epicyclets".