counter-earth

alternative counter-Earth · alternative counterearth

1. no pluralA hypothetical planet sharing an orbit with the earth, but on the opposite side of the sun.

   To the same period may perhaps belong the theory that the comet is a separate planet; this eighth planet might serve, when the counter-earth had been discarded, to maintain the number ten in regard to the heavenly bodies.

   1881, Eduard Zeller, Sarah Frances Alleyne, A History of Greek Philosophy

   2 more examples

   The report of Aristotle and Philip of Opus, that the higher frequency of lunar than of solar eclipses was explained by the presence of the counter-earth, and perhaps also other earth-like bodies in space, takes us into a similar context.

   1972, Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, page 344

   The interposition of the counter-earth between the sun and the moon is the cause of their eclipses. And just as our earth has a counter-earth, each planet has a counter-planet, a planetary companion (as Bruno would say in his later works), which revolves with the other one on the same circle but at the opposite end of its diameter.

   2016, Miguel Á. Granada, Patrick J. Boner, Dario Tessicini, Unifying Heaven and Earth, page 126

1. alternativeAlternative form of counter-earth.

   The Earth has its counter-Earth, matter its anti-matter and each reality has its counter-reality, all of it wrapped into the Ultimate Essence.

   2014, George Lysloff, Personal Journals of a Would-Be Philosopher, page 58

   3 more examples

   Possibly to explain eclipses, and possibly to achieve for the astral world the perfection of the number Ten, Philolaus imagined that a dark Counter-Earth existed, invisible to the Earth.

   2001, B. K. Ridley, On Science

   These ten Spheres were the sun, moon, Earth, the five additional known planets at the time—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—the counter-Earth, and the central hearth.

   2005, Dimitra Karamanides, Pythagoras

   His convoluted ideas, derived before the concept of the gravitational force was known, had the Earth and the counter-Earth orbiting a central fire of the universe, which was not the Sun.

   2010, Neil F. Comins, What If the Earth Had Two Moons?