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William Herschel
Herschel built truly large telescopes to study the stars. With these telescopes he discovered the Milky Way Galaxy and nebulae. Within his lifetime, Hrschel documented over 2,500 nebulae. -
Friedrich Bessel
Bessel was the first astronomer to accurately measure the distance to a star, this took him 28 years to calculate. Bessel observed the star 61 Cygni in comparison to other background stars to calculate a distance of 11.4 light years. He also used a split image telescope to measure the distance between stars. -
William and Margaret Huggins
William was the first astronomer to detect the same elements in stars as our sun. This concluded that stars were like our sun. The Huggins were the first astronomers to observe that Sirius is moving towards Earth. This was the foundation for William's method called the Doppler Shift. -
Henrietta Leavitt
Leavitt was the astronomer that discovered how to measure the distance of stars that were more than 100 light years away. She compared pictures of individual stars from different times and dates to see what changes occured. Henrietta Leavitt discovered that brighter stars have longer periods. -
Albert Einstein
Einstein had a theory that massive objects have so much gravitational power that they bend space and time around them. This was his explanation for why the moon does not fly into space away from Earth. Einstein believed that the universe was either shrinking or expanding. -
Harlow Shapley
Shapley discovered the position of Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. In order to do this, Shapley used the largest telescope during his time called the 60-inch reflecting telescope. He also used the inverse square law to measure the distance between galaxies. -
Edwin Hubble
Hubble measured the distances and movements of galaxies. He also took some of the best pictures of the Mily Way to prove that some objects are well beyond our galaxy. He measured the distance and Doppler Shift of as many galaxies as he could in his lifetime. -
Ralph Alpher
Alpher demonstrated a miniature simulation of how the universe first expanded using particles that would be needed to form helium and hydrogen. Within five minutes, the experiment was concluded. This gave the idea that our universe was created using the Big Bang Theory in five minutes! That is crazy and so cool! -
Maarten Schmidt
Schmidt discovered the first Quasars and further proved the Steady State Theory of the universe. Quasars are objects in space that look like stars but are so bright and so far away that they have to be something more. Schmidt named the first quasar that he discovered 3C 273. -
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
This pair of astronomers proved the Big Bang Theory by identifying the light released by the atoms that created our universe. The light was redshifted times 1,000. This meant that only microwaves would be able to detect the light. -
Vera Rubin and Kent Ford
Rubin and Ford began measuring the mass of spiral galaxies. During this time, Rubin discovered that the masses were much greater than expected and estimated using the size and brightness of stars and gases in the galaxies. This couple discovered dark matter. -
Margaret Geller and John Huchra
Geller and Huchra measured many distances that seperated different galaxies. With this knowledge and steady calculations, they were the first to make a map of galaxies. This map was special because it was 3D and it measured over tens of thousands of galaxies. -
John Mather and George Smoot
These two astronomers produced an image of what our universe looked like when it was 389,000 years old. A satellite was developed from this called the WMAP satellite. This satellite determined that our universe is 13.7 billion years old. -
Robert Williams
Robert Williams was the Director of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. Williams used the telescope at one point to look at a space where there were no planets, stars, or galaxies. After 11.3 days of intense work, he produced an image with throusands of galaxies all in one place. -
Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt
This pair discovered that the universe was not only expanding, it was accelerating. Since the Big Bang, the universe has expanded and accelerated its speed of expansion greatly. This team was located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboraotry in California. -
Wendy Freedman
Freedman is at the head of development for the Giant Magellan Telescope. This telescope will be able to take the sharpest images of the universe that the world has seen using a primary mirror measuring 25 meters in diameter. Freedman also improved and made more accurate the large scale maps of the universe created by Huchra and Geller.
