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384 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle, also known as the Grandfather of Science, was born in 384 BC and mistakenly believed that the earth was the center of the solar system. He also thought that the earth was made up of 4 elements, earth, water, air, and fire. He strongly believed that celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and stars were perfectly symmetrical and rounded. Even though he was wrong about his theories he led us to brand new ones which are true to this day, he expanded human knowledge and logic greatly. -
100
Ptolemy
Ptolemy was born in 100 and died in 168 and created a theory of the solar system where he could see where the planets were in the past and in the future. He considered earth the center of the universe. Also he was roman. -
1473
Copernicus
Copernicus was a mathematician and astronomer and was born 1473. He was a scientist who made a model of the universe and was the first one that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe. -
1546
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe was an astronomer who was famously known for his accurate and comprehensive planet observations. He found out that the moon orbits the earth. But he was also incorrect about the sun orbiting earth. -
1564
Galileo
Using his telescope to explore the universe, Galileo observed the moon and found Venus had phases like the moon, proving it rotated around the sun, which refuted the Aristotelian doctrine that the Earth was the center of the universe. He also discovered Jupiter had revolving moons that didn’t revolve around planet Earth. In 1613, he published his observations of sunspots, which also refuted Aristotelian doctrine that the sun was perfect. -
1570
Hans Lippershay
Hans Lippershey died in the Netherlands in 1619, just a few years after Galileo's monumental observations using the telescope. He sorta made the telescope because he put the first patent on it but there were definitely other forms of it. A crater on the Moon is named in his honor, as well as asteroid 31338 Lippershey. In addition, a recently discovered exoplanet bears his name. -
1571
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler discovered the three laws of planetary motion.(1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; (2) the time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and that arc; (3) there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits. -
Giovanni Cassini
Giovanni Cassini helped decide about how far the plants were form earth and would be able to map out the dimensions of the Solar System. He helped set up the Paris Observatory. He was the first to observe Saturn's moons. -
Sir Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton contributed to the field of science over his lifetime. He invented calculus, but his most significant work had to do with forces, and specifically with the development of a universal law of gravity called Newtons Laws of Motion. -
William Herschel
William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, he hypothesized that nebulae are composed of stars and discovered a theory of stellar evolution. He was the founder of sidereal astronomy for the systematic observations of the heavens. -
Percival Lowell
Lowell had studied what he thought were artificial craters on mars, he believed that there was intelligent life on mars. He kept his studies a secret and first and after a while of research he found what he called Planet X which is commonly called Pluto nowadays. -
Ejnar Hertzsprung
Ejnar Hertzsprung classified stars by relating their color to their absolute brightness which was an accomplishment of fundamental importance to modern astronomy. In 1913 he established the luminosity scale of Cepheid variable stars, a tool for measurement of intergalactic distances. -
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, best known for his Special and General Theory of Relativity and the concept of mass-energy equivalence expressed by the famous equation, E = mc2. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect” and he made some essential contributions to the early development of quantum theory. -
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble was an american astronomer who was the first to discover that there were other galaxies than the milky way changing the way we look at the universe. He demonstrated that the universe was expanding, and he formulated Hubble's Law where galaxies move away from the milky way proportionally to how far they are to it. -
Karl Jansky
Karl Jansky was an American Engineer whose study of radio waves from an extra terrestrial source inaugurated the development of radio astronomy, a new science that from the mid-20th century greatly extended the range of astronomical observations. -
Sputnik
What is a Sputnik: Each of a series of Soviet artificial satellites, the first of which (launched on October 4, 1957) was the first satellite to be placed in orbit. It was the first satellite to be placed in orbit of the earth and was about the size of a beach ball. -
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin was the first person to fly in space. His flight, on April 12, 1961, lasted 108 minutes as he circled the Earth for a little more than one orbit in the Soviet Union's Vostok spacecraft. Following the flight, Gagarin became a cultural hero in the Soviet Union. Even today, more than six decades after the historic flight, Gagarin is widely celebrated in Russian space museums. -
John Glenn
On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, it took him about four hours and 56 minutes to circle the earth three times in the space capsule friendship seven. -
Neil Armstrong
In 1969 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Micheal Collins took a trip to the moon on Apollo 11. About 530 million people watched the launch and they were the first men on the moon. When landing on the moon and stepping out Neil says the famous quote still said today, "A small step for man, a giant step for mankind". -
Apollo Program
The Apollo Program was the third United States human spaceflight program by NASA, which succeeded in the first ever moon landing in 1962. This program lasted from 1963-1972. -
First Space Shuttle Flight
The Space Shuttle program was the fourth human spaceflight program carried out by the NASA, which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. The first flight that they had performed in the Columbia Rocket was called STS-1 launched April 12 and landed April 14 and John W. Young and pilot Robert L. Crippen were the people in the shuttle. -
Mars Pathfinder
Mars Pathfinder was launched December 4, 1996 and landed on Mars on July 4, 1997. It was designed as a technology demonstration of a new way to deliver an instrumented lander and the first-ever robotic rover to the surface of the red planet. Pathfinder not only accomplished this goal but also returned an unprecedented amount of data and outlived its primary design life. -
Cassini Orbiter
Cassini Orbiter was launched by NASA in 1997 and by July 2004 reached Saturn and its moons and took very amazing pictures of Saturn which were sent back to Earth. It was equipped with great cameras and technologies to help it last longer and send back high quality photos. -
Refracting & Reflecting telescopes
A telescope which uses a converging lens to collect the light, unlike the reflecting telescope which is a telescope in which a mirror is used to collect and focus light. -
Black Hole Transport?
One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined. Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity - which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.
