epsilon is the fifth letter of the greek alphabet.
epsilon is the fifth letter of the greek alphabet.
what is the fifth letter of the greek alphabet?
epsilon
epsilon eridani's bayer designation was established in 1603 as part of the "uranometria", a star catalogue produced by german celestial cartographer johann bayer. his catalogue assigned letters from the greek alphabet to groups of stars belonging to the same visual magnitude class in each constellation, beginning with alpha (α) for a star in the brightest class. bayer made no attempt to arrange stars by relative brightness within each class. thus, although epsilon is the fifth letter in the greek alphabet, the star is the tenth-brightest in eridanus. in addition to the letter ε, bayer had given it the number 13 (the same as ptolemy's catalogue number, as were many of bayer's numbers) and described it as , . bayer assigned epsilon eridani magnitude 3.
epsilon eridani
the classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the greek language was originally the local alphabet of ionia. by the late fifth century bc, it was commonly used by many athenians. in 403 bc, at the suggestion of the archon eucleides, the athenian assembly formally abandoned the old attic alphabet and adopted the ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after the overthrow of the thirty tyrants. because of eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "eucleidean alphabet". roughly thirty years later, the eucleidean alphabet was adopted in boeotia and it may have been adopted a few years previously in macedonia. by the end of the fourth century bc, it had displaced local alphabets across the greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the greek alphabet.
greek alphabet