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AN IMPROMPTU GUIDE TO DEFINING MOMENTS IN ASTRONOMY HISTORY
270 B.C. Aristarchus proposed earth-centered universe
120 A.D. Ptolomey proposed sun-centered universe
1250 A.D Roger Bacon proposes that there are inhabited planets throughout the universe
1570: Nicolas Copernicus re-invents idea of earth-centered universe
1609: Galileo Galilei turns his telescope skyward and discovered the phases of Venus, satellites of Jupiter, stellar nature of the Milky Way, and numerous craters on the moon.
1675: Danish astronomer Ole Romer accurately measures the speed of light, establishing a basis for understanding many astronomical phenomena.
1700: British scientist Issac Newton deduces the wave nature of light and color. This allows for the development of spectroscopy.
1761: Russian astronomer Mikhail Lomonosov discovers during a transit of Venus that the planet has an atmosphere, confirming that planets in the sky were other worlds, perhaps like Earth.
1781: German-English amateur astronomer William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus – doubling the size of the known solar system.
1784: French astronomer Charles Messier publishes catalog of nebulae, to assist in searching for comets.
1801: Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi recognized the first known asteroid, called Ceres.
1834-1838: English astronomer John Herschel undertakes a massive program of discovery in the Southern Hemisphere from the Cape of Good Hope, cataloging thousands of sky objects.
1834: The New York Sun publishes a series of articles describing how Herschel has observed life on the Moon, including bat-people and biped beavers. The public readily accepts the idea of life on another world. The article series is soon concluded to be a hoax.
1838: German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel makes the first calculation of a star's distance by parallax, for 61 Cygni, arriving at 10.3 light-years.
1846: Based on a independent mathematical calculation by Urbain Le Verrier and John Adams, German astronomers Johann Galle and Heinrich D'Arrest spot the planet Neptune. This again doubles size of known solar system.
1864: With the new technique of spectroscopy at hand, English astronomer William Huggins discovers that nebulae are composed of gas rather than stars.
1877: with Mars at opposition, Aspen Hall of the U.S. Naval Observatory discovers two small moons orbiting Mars. Itallian astronomer Giovani Sciaparelli reports seeing linear features, called “canalli” on Mars.
1900: Boston astronomer Percival Lowell proposes that Mars is inhabited with intelligent being building canals for irrigation, which he reports seeing.
1900-1910 Albert Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity lay the groundwork for 20th century astrophysics.
1912: Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt completes studies of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) that lead to the development of the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars, a technique that enable using them to estimate distances to galaxies many millions of light-years away.
1918: American astronomer Harlow Shapley accurately defines the shape and size of the galaxy, based on studies of globular star clusters in Sagittarius.
1919: Arthur Eddington confirms Einstein’ s Theory of General Relativity by successfully measuring the deflection of starlight during a solar-eclipse expedition.
1923: American astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrates that galaxies are separate island universes of stars outside the Milky Way.
1927: Cleric Georges Lemaitre proposes that the universe began as a small dense "cosmic egg”
1926: Edwin Hubble finds that galaxies are moving apart at a rate proportional to their distances from earth, confirming the model of a uniformly expanding universe. The cosmological redshift the galaxies display was observed by Vesto Slifer in 1911, but he did not realize the “spiral nebulae” were actually other galaxies.
1930: After an exhaustive search through millions of star images, young American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto on a pair of glass Photographic plates.
1931-1932: Using his Bell Laboratories antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, Karl Jansky detects radio energy from the Milky Way, initiating radio astronomy.
1948: Soviet physicist George Gamov predicts that if the universe was once hot and dense, leftover radiation should be able to me be detected. British astronomer Fred Hoyle invents the term “Big Bang” to illustrate the notion of a hot expanding universe. This derisive name sticks. Despite the fact Hoyle is a steady-state cosmologist.
1957: first manmade satellite launched, opening Space Race between the U.S. and USSR.
1958: astronomers deduce how heavier elements are made in stars.
1958: the Soviet Union photographs the never-before-seen farside of the Moon
1960: Radio astronomer Frank Drake conducts the first experiment to listen for intelligent signals from a civilization around another star
1960s: Military satellites pick up powerful bursts of gamma-rays from deep space. 1992, the GRO satellite shows they are isotropic.
1962: The Soviet Union launches the first human into space and safely returns him.
1963:
Astronomers at Palomar observatory discover quasi-stellar object (quasars) brilliant sources of energy near the edge of the known universe
Engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally identify the cosmic background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang, using a microwave satellite antenna at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
1965: Caltech astronomer Maarten Schmidt identifies "quasi-stellar objects," radio sources known as quasars, which subsequently were found to be the highly energetic centers of young galaxies. Hubble telescope observations in the mid 1990’s show that a large proportion of quasars are in interacting galaxies
1966: British radio astronomers discovery pulsars, a class of neutron star that flickers because it is rapidly rotating.
1967: Astronomer Craig Wheeler coins the term “black hole” to describe a collapsed piece of space-time.
1969: first humans land on the Moon
1970: X-ray astronomer Riccardo Giacconi discovers the first stellar black hole
1972: The Mars orbiting Mariner 9 spacecraft discovers ancient river beds, grand chasms, and immense dormant volcanoes on Mars.
1973: NASA’s Pioneer 10 space probe is the first manamade object to reach Jupiter, at the outer solar system.
1975: The Soviet Venera 9 lands on Venus.
1976: first U.S. spacecraft lands on Mars. Conducts life experiments
1979 – 1989: the Voyager 2 spacecraft visits all the planets of the outer solar system (except Pluto)
1979: The first evidence on volcanism is discovered on another world, the Jovian moon Io
1990: The reality of the big bang’s radiation is confirmed by NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE).
1988: NASA’s Magellan probe radar maps Venus.
1991: Congress cancels funding for NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), program as “frivolous” science. Private contributions continue the research.
1992: Astronomers discover the first planets outside our solar system, orbiting a pulsar.
1992: Astronomers confirm the existence of and icy asteroid belt beyond Neptune, called the Kuiper belt.
1993: Hubble Space Telescope resolves pancake-like disk or dust around young stars in the Orion Nebula, and the closer Taurus-Auriga starbirth region. This provides the first direct visual confirmation of the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace’s description, in 1796, of his "nebular hypothesis" of the origin of the solar system, which basically explains how the sun and planets were born.
1994:
Hubble Space Telescope confirms that supermassive black holes exist in the hearts of some galaxies, the first proof that super massive black holes exist.
Telescopes around the world are trained on Jupiter to witness for the first time a collision between a comet (Shoemaker-Levy 9) and a planet.
1995: Astronomers discover the first extrasolar planet around a sunlike star called 51 Pegasi.
1996: Hubble Space Telescope takes the deepest-ever view of the sky, providing a “core sample” of the universe for unraveling the evolution of galaxies and starbirth rates in the early universe.
1996: A meteorite from Mars is suspected to contain organic material from Martian microorganisms.
1997
gamma-ray bursts are found to originate in distant galaxies, making them the most powerful explosions in the universe.
After a 20-year hiatus, NASA lands a spacecraft on Mars, carrying onboard a small rover vehicle, Soujourner.
1998: Astronomers discover that the universe is not only expanding but also accelerating due to a mysterious form of “repulsive gravity” first theorized by Einstein.
1999: Hubble telescope makes precise measurement of expansion rate of the local universe.
2001: Hubble makes the first measurement of the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.
2002: Astronomers identify the oldest white dwarf stars in the universe and use them to precisely calculate the universe’s age as 13.7 billion years.
2003
NASA’s WMAP satellite makes a detailed map of the lumpy structure of the cosmic microwave background. This imprint of the universe’s appearance 360,000 years after the Big Bang yield informational “blueprint” of how matter and structure arose in the universe.
The farthest known object in the Solar System, named Sedna, is discovered at a distance of 7 billion miles.
The last signal is received from Mankind’s first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the Pioneer 10 probe.
2004
Two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, find evidence that Mars once had standing water.
Hubble Space Telescope takes mankind’s deepest-ever view of the universe. Taking astronomers back to seeing objects that existed when the universe was 5% of its present age.
2005:
A European space probe, Huygens, makes a parachuted landing onto the surface of Titan. This is the first landing on the surface of an outer solar system body.
A manmade projectile crashes into the nucleus comet Tempel 1 to investigate the composition and structure e of comet.
Two small satellites are discovered orbiting Pluto.
2006:
The stardust space probe brings back dust from a comet
Astrophysicists deduce the reality of cosmic inflation from studying the cosmic microwave background
Astronomers determine that short gamma-ray bursts come from colliding black holes or neutron stars. While long duration bursts come from chemically primitive, supermassive stars that explode as supernovae.
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