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The three laws of kleper
These were created by kepler to mathematically describe the motion of the planets in their orbits around the sun -
Huygens and the rings of saturn
Huygens together with his brother constantijn elaborate a telescope of about 50 magnifications, with which the enigmatic saturn was launched into the study -
The Paris and Greenwich observatories
Louis XIV creates the Paris Observatory with the aim of improving knowledge about the universe, while Charles II creates the Greenwich Observatory, these observatories provide a platform for catalogs and maps to improve the scope of astronomy -
Isaac Newton's legacy
Newton extended the terrestrial laws of mechanics to the entire cosmos, implying that nature would be governed by universal laws -
Bradley discovers the aberration of light
At the beginning of the 18th century it was not known how far away the stars were, Bradley's discovery was fundamental when he discovered, in addition to the aberration of light, nutation, this project was prepared to measure paralactic movement -
The transits of Venus
Edmond devised a precision method to estimate the distance to the sun that consisted of making comparative measurements of Venus transits from distant places on earth. -
The Messier catalog
Messier compiled a catalog of 110 fixed nebula stars, it contains the most beautiful and spectacular objects, mainly star clusters, nebulae and galaxies. This catalog marks a milestone in the beginning of the study of deep space. -
William Herschel discovers Uranus
Herschel wrote in his notebook of observations that he had observed in Geminis a curious diffuse star that was visibly larger than the rest, in fact this star could not be a star because it was disk-shaped and also moved with respect to the background of fixed stars. -
Herschel telescopes
From 1781 Herschel began to build progressively larger reflecting telescopes. The first mirror he cast, which was 15 cm in diameter, was followed by others of 22.5 cm, 48 cm, and 60 cm, to culminate in a really giant telescope for the time, a 1.21 Mt mirror with a 12 Mt long. -
Herschel: Exploring the Galaxy and Discovering the Infrared
Herschel identified hundreds of binary stars, which allowed to extend the law of universal gravitation beyond the solar system, cataloging some 2,500 nebulae, deduced the approximate shape of our galaxy, the Milky Way and verified the movement of the sun in sine, also discovered the radiation -
Laplace exposes the world system
Laplace published "exposition of the world system", a work in which I formulate a theory about the formation of the sun and the solar system from a nebula -
Discovery of tiny planets
After locating Ceres, three other similar planets, Pallas, Vesta, and Juno, were soon discovered. Compared to those already known, all these planets were really tiny. -
Fraunhofer and the dark lines of the sun
Fraunhofer when analyzing sunlight discovered mysterious dark lines that appeared at very well defined frequencies half a century later Kirchhoff and Bunsen demonstrated that these Fraunhofer lines were the fingerprints of the elements present in the sun's atmosphere. -
Measure star distances
Friedrich Bessel measured the distance to the star 61 Cygni, shortly after Wilhelm Struve measured the distance to Vega and Henderson that of the closest star to the sun. If he got an idea of the interstellar scales in this way, these measurements also allowed comparing the luminosities of the stars with each other, which led to the conclusion that the sun was only one average star among the innumerable observable stars in the vault. -
The discovery of Neptune
The discovery of neptune was not accidental but was due to predictions made by mathematical calculations. Indeed, after the discovery of uranus, astronomers applied themselves to determine the parameters of its elliptical orbit. -
Huggins and the birth of astrophysics
Light analysis revealed a single emission light, implying that this nebula was made of a fluorescent gas. His observation method (spectroscopy) applying to other nebulae and stars not only allowed him to discover their chemical composition but also their physical parameters (temperatures and density) -
Photographic astronomy, a revolution
Scottish astronomer David Gill obtained a stunning photograph of a large comet. In addition to the minute details observed on the star, the area of the sky covered by the photograph revealed thousands of stars that were invisible to ocular observation. -
Galileo and observation in the telescope
Galileo Galilei was also the first person to observe the sky with a telescope, and what he saw surpassed what no one could have imagined. -
Einstein's relativistic universe
In Einstein's vision, matter, space and time are three interconnected elements, gravity can be interpreted as a curvature of space. In space-time light moves at constant speed describing curved paths as it is deflected by the presence of short materials. The theory of relativity elegantly solved the problems of classical physics and made other surprising ones that were experimentally verified in a spectacular way ... -
Hubble and the ultragalactic universe
Edwin Hubble measured the distance to Andromeda and other spiral nebulae and showed that such nebulae were outside and very far from the Milky Way. Such nebulae were therefore independent of ours, indicating that the universe was much larger than previously believed. -
The birth of radio astronomy
The Earth's atmosphere acts as a barrier blocking much of the radiation that is emitted beyond the ultraviolet and did not have the necessary technology to build detectors in electromagnetic ranges other than optical. -
The discovery of quasars
The rapid development of radio astronomy after the Second World War led to the identification of mysterious sources of radio waves that, optically, looked like very faint stars. In 1963, the Dutch-American astronomer Marteen Schmidt estimated the distance and luminosity of some of these radio sources and concluded that they were galaxies located in the confines of the known Universe. -
The echo of the big bang
Mysterious microwave radiation was discovered at the bottom of the sky. Such radiation, the existence of which had been predicted by several researchers during the previous two decades, could be immediately recognized as a relic of the big bang. These observations therefore confirmed the interpretation of the Hubble law. -
The first pulsars
The discovery of new astronomical objects. And they called them pulsating radio sources or simply pulsars, since they were emitters of extremely rapid bursts of microwaves that reached the earth with surprising regularity. -
Hubble Space Telescope Launch
In 1990, after numerous studies and experiments with smaller space telescopes, NASA (in collaboration with ESA) launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Equipped with a 2.4 meter diameter mirror and free from the constraints the atmosphere imposes on ground observations, Hubble has provided spectacular results in all fields of astronomy. -
The 'boom' of extrasolar planets
In 1995 astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the detection of 51 Pegasi b, a planet that orbits around a solar-type star 50 light years from Earth. Quickly confirmed by the Americans Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler, this discovery launched an intense race that has led to the detection of a total of more than 400 extrasolar planets -
A black hole in the center of our Galaxy
In 2002, an international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich presented the results of a ten-year patrol of the S2 star that orbits around the Center of the Milky Way. Their measurements indicated that our galactic center is occupied by a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses. -
The construction of giant telescopes
In 2009, simultaneously with the launch of three powerful space telescopes, Kepler, Herschel and Planck, the essential characteristics of three Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT), two North American and one European, are being defined.
