Presented for the first time in popular form is the fascinating true story of the search for the phantom planet Vulcan. As with legends of "the lost continent of Atlantis," scientists and dreamers alike have sought to prove that Vulcan is more than just a myth. Historians of astronomy Richard Baum and William Sheehan have combed the continents, digging through dusty letters and journals, to unravel this mysterious and captivating tale. The planet first assumed a shadowy reality against a backdrop of war and revolution early in the nineteenth century. Le Verrier, the autocratic Director of the Paris Observatory, had unveiled a problem with the motion of the planet Mercury. The indications were of a planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Incredibly, the prediction was immediately fulfilled by an obscure French country doctor using no more than a homemade telescope. The planet, named for the Roman god of fire, was no sooner discovered than it was lost. Still it reappeared often enough to tantalize even skeptics into considering its shadowy existence possible. This fast-paced tale follows the exploits of Le Verrier, and later of his followers, in a pursuit of his unbridled obsessions: to extend the universality of Newton's Laws, to prove Vulcan's existence, and to secure his place in history as one of the greatest astronomers of his time. Stranger than fiction, the story reaches an exciting climax in the final showdown in the unlikeliest of places: America's Wild West. Like gunslingers at high noon, determined astronomers of the opposing camps brave Indians and the elements in their attempt to prove once and for all whether the planet exists. They congregate with some of the most illustrious names of their time for the final test: a grand eclipse of the sun. Today every schoolchild learns that our solar system contains nine planets in orbit around the sun--plus a variety of other bodies such as asteroids--but as Richard Baum and William Sheehan describe in In Search of Planet Vulcan, the discovery of these facts was far from straightforward. In a book rich with historical anecdotes, Baum and Sheehan depict centuries of efforts to enumerate the inhabitants of our solar system. In some cases the successes are stunning proof of the veracity of Newtonian mechanics; in others, such as the quest for a hypothetical planet "Vulcan" orbiting well inside Mercury, the fallacies and failures are equally staggering. Before it spawned Spock, the "planet" Vulcan was proposed to orbit inside Mercury to account for a chronic deviation in Mercury's predicted orbit. When amateur astronomer Edmond Lescarbault claimed to see the culprit, case closed, right? But try as they might, no one else could observe the fugitive; still, theoretically, its existence suited world-class mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, so he offered proof. A curiosity in the history of astronomy, the case demonstrates how a scientific authority can get the whole world barking up the wrong tree. Baum and Sheehan readably recount how Le Verrier made his name by explaining perturbations in Uranus' orbit in terms of an unknown planet, duly discovered as Neptune in 1846. The authors give a merry rendition of astronomers tramping to solar eclipses to glimpse Vulcan, the repeated futility of which finished it off, but the problem of Mercury's orbit persisted. Einstein eventually solved it: a curvature of space-time, not a planet, explained Mercury's orbit. Enjoyable recreational reading for astro-buffs. Gilbert Taylor Presented for the first time in popular form is the fascinating true story of the search for the phantom planet Vulcan. As with legends of "the lost continent of Atlantis", scientists and dreamers alike have sought to prove that Vulcan is more than just a myth. Historians of astronomy Richard Baum and William Sheehan have combed the continents, digging through dusty letters and journals, to unravel this mysterious and captivating tale. The planet first assumed a shadowy reality against a backdrop of war and revolution early in the nineteenth century. Le Verrier, the autocratic Director of the Paris Observatory, had unveiled a problem with the motion of the planet Mercury. The indications were of a planet closer to the sun than Mercury. Incredibly, the prediction was immediately fulfilled by an obscure French country doctor using no more than a homemade telescope. The planet, named for the Roman god of fire, was no sooner discovered than it was lost. Still it reappeared often enough to tantalize even skeptics into considering its shadowy existence possible. This fast-paced tale follows the exploits of Le Verrier, and later of his followers, in a pursuit of his unbridled obsessions: to extend the universality of Newton's Laws, to prove Vulcan's existence, and to secure his place in history as one of the greatest astronomers of his time. Stranger than fiction, the story reaches an exciting climax in the final showdown in the unlikeliest of pla