Ole Rømer - Rømer and The Speed of Light

Rømer and The Speed of Light

The determination of longitude is a significant practical problem in cartography and navigation. Philip III of Spain offered a prize for a method to determine the longitude of a ship out of sight of land, and Galileo proposed a method of establishing the time of day, and thus longitude, based on the times of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter, in essence using the Jovian system as a cosmic clock; this method was not significantly improved until accurate mechanical clocks were developed in the eighteenth century. Galileo proposed this method to the Spanish crown (1616–1617) but it proved to be impractical, because of the inaccuracies of Galileo's timetables and the difficulty of observing the eclipses on a ship. However, with refinements the method could be made to work on land.

After studies in Copenhagen, Rømer joined the observatory of Uraniborg on the island of Hven, near Copenhagen, in 1671. Over a period of several months, Jean Picard and Rømer observed about 140 eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io, while in Paris Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed the same eclipses. By comparing the times of the eclipses, the difference in longitude of Paris to Uranienborg was calculated.

Cassini had observed the moons of Jupiter between 1666 and 1668, and discovered discrepancies in his measurements that, at first, he attributed to light having a finite speed. In 1672 Rømer went to Paris and continued observing the satellites of Jupiter as Cassini's assistant. Rømer added his own observations to Cassini's and observed that times between eclipses (particularly those of Io) got shorter as Earth approached Jupiter, and longer as Earth moved farther away. Cassini made an announcement to the Academy of Sciences on 22 August 1676:

This second inequality appears to be due to light taking some time to reach us from the satellite; light seems to take about ten to eleven minutes a distance equal to the half-diameter of the terrestrial orbit.

Oddly, Cassini seems to have abandoned this reasoning, which Rømer adopted and set about buttressing in an irrefutable manner, using a selected number of observations performed by Picard and himself between 1671 and 1677. Rømer presented his results to the French Academy of Sciences, and it was summarised soon after by an anonymous reporter in a short paper, Démonstration touchant le mouvement de la lumière trouvé par M. Roemer de l'Académie des sciences, published 7 December 1676 in the Journal des sçavans. Unfortunately the paper bears the stamp of the reporter failing to understand Rømer's presentation, and as the reporter resorted to cryptic phrasings to hide his lack of understanding, he obfuscated Rømer's reasoning in the process. Unfortunately Rømer himself never published his results.

Assume the Earth is in L, at the second quadrature with Jupiter (i.e. ALB is 90°), and Io emerges from D. After several orbits of Io, at 42.5 hours per orbit, the Earth is in K. Rømer reasoned that if light is not propagated instantaneously, the additional time it takes to reach K, that he reckoned about 3½ minutes, would explain the observed delay. Rømer observed immersions in C from the symmetric positions F and G, to avoid confusing eclipses (Io shadowed by Jupiter from C to D) and occultations (Io hidden behind Jupiter at various angles). In the table below, his observations in 1676, including the one on August 7, believed to be in opposition H, and the one observed at Paris Observatory to be 10 minutes late, on November 9.

By trial and error, during eight years of observations Rømer worked out how to account for the retardation of light when reckoning the ephemeris of Io. He calculated the delay as a proportion of the angle corresponding to a given Earth's position with respect to Jupiter, Δt = 22·(α⁄_180°). When the angle α is 180° the delay becomes 22 minutes, which may be interpreted as the time necessary for the light to cross a distance equal to the diameter of the Earth's orbit, H to E. (Actually, Jupiter is not visible from the conjunction point E.) That interpretation makes it possible to calculate the strict result of Rømer's observations: The ratio of the speed of light to the speed with which Earth orbits the sun, which is the ratio of the duration of a year divided by pi as compared to the 22 minutes

365·24·60⁄_π·22 ≈ 7,600.

In comparison the modern value is circa 299,792 km s−1⁄_{29.8 km s−1} ≈ 10,100.

Rømer neither calculated this ratio, nor did he give a value for the speed of light. However, many others calculated a speed from his data, the first being Christiaan Huygens; after corresponding with Rømer and eliciting more data, Huygens deduced that light travelled 16 2⁄₃ Earth diameters per second.

Rømer's view that the velocity of light was finite was not fully accepted until measurements of the so-called aberration of light were made by James Bradley in 1727.

In 1809, again making use of observations of Io, but this time with the benefit of more than a century of increasingly precise observations, the astronomer Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre reported the time for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth as 8 minutes and 12 seconds. Depending on the value assumed for the astronomical unit, this yields the speed of light as just a little more than 300,000 kilometres per second. The modern value is 8 minutes and 19 seconds, and a speed of 299,792.46 km/s.

A plaque at the Observatory of Paris, where the Danish astronomer happened to be working, commemorates what was, in effect, the first measurement of a universal quantity made on this planet.