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Galileo builds the first telescope
Galileo builds the worlds first telescope in the summer of 1608 using two pieces of glass and putting them together like a magnifying glass to observe distant objects. His telescope discovered waundering stars that happend to be planets, the moons scarred terrain, Jupiter and the moons revolving arounf Jupiter and by drawing Venus' shawdows Galileo came to the shocking conclusion that all things revolve around the Sun and not the Earth. -
Sir Issac Newton creates first reflector telescope
Newton finds that white light is composed of all colors. He then abandons the refracting telescope and uses curved mirrors instead which focuses light better because light bounces off of mirrors surfaces and does not pass through so the new telescopes eliminated the distorted colors of the old telecopes. -
William Herschel advances Newtons telescope
Herschel started developing a 20 foot reflector telescope like Newtons only this time made out of metal himself in the year of 1781. With these new advances he was able to see farther into space and was the first to discover Uranus. -
William Herschal later years
Making minor adjustments (revloving) his telescope built in the late 1700s Hershal begins to study the cosmos which was thought to have been the milky way at the time. He discovered infrared radiation and used that to map nebuli to try and find the edge of the cosmos. -
Lord Rosses reflectors
Rosse wanted to build the worlds biggest telescope (54 feet long) and he made his giant mirrors from scratch by melting and grinding down metals. He thought the bigger the telescope the farther he could see. A major discovery from this telescope was M51 which happened to be the famous whirpool galaxy -
Mount Wilson Observatory built
Two telescopes, the Hooker and Hale built side by side up on the mountain peaks these telescopes took 80 years to build. They were built on top of mounains because Earth's atmosphere distorts images. With this telescope it is discovered that the other nebuli were not stars or planets but galaxies! -
Edwin Hubble's telescope and discoveries
Edwin Hubble builds a 100 inch telescope on the peak of Mount Rossen in New Mexico. Hubble discovers the galaxies are moving away from each other by analyzing light through a spectrascope. Started ideas of Universial expansion and the big bang. Came up with idea that the farther away galaxies were the faster they were moving. -
Penzias and Wilson: Cosmic Background Radiation(Radio Telescope)
Penzias and Wilson dicovered Cosmic Background Radiaton, crutial evidence to the big bang theory. Looking at the sky they found radiation temps to be warmer than expected, 3 degrees above absolute zero, another researcher also calculated that temps like that came from the time right after the big bang. -
The Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space telescope was one of the first to be launched into space from NASA in 1990. A famous picture taken of a teeny black spot in space and from that 10,000 galaxies were seen that are 4 billion times dimmer than what we can see with the human eye. The question of dark matter and dark energy were raised, something still unknown to even the most well known scientists of the 21st century have yet to answer. -
WMAP telescope created
The WMAP is a giant antenna with two telescopes one on each side. The WMAP showed different colors of infrared light when pointed at the sky. Changes in the red spots showed where matter comes together and how stars and galaxies were formed. From this the exact age of the Universe was discovered, 13.7 billion years old.
