Discovery of double stars by Giovanni Battista Hodierna in 1654

Abstract

ABSTRACT It has been generally accepted that the originators of the double star astronomy were Christian Mayer and William Herschel. We recovered the memory of the poorly known Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna, who published the first catalogue of stellar binaries over a century before Mayer and Herschel. We analysed the fourth section of 1654 G. B. Hodierna’s book ‘De systemate orbis cometici deque admirandis coeli characteribus’. There, Hodierna listed a dozen pairs of stars whose identification with modern star names had been lost for centuries. To identify the pairs, we used Hodierna’s Latin descriptions of location in constellations for all primary stars, ecliptic coordinates and angular separations to companions for some, and the Washington Double Star, Hipparcos, and Gaia catalogues. We were able to identify the twelve primaries and eleven multiple systems with companions, of which nine were double and two were triple. Besides, with up-to-date data, we confirmed that four systems are physically bound: Atlas and Pleione, $\alpha ^{1,2}$ Lib, $\nu ^{1,2}$ Dra, and $\theta ^{1}$ Ori A, C, and D. The other seven pairs are alignments of very bright stars at different distances.