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1 BCE
The Big Bang Theory
Nobody knows exactly how the universe came into existence, but many scientists believe that it happened about 13.7 billion years ago with a massive explosion, called the Big Bang. In 1927, Georges Lemaître proposed the Big Bang theory of the universe. The theory says that all the matter in the universe was originally compressed into a tiny dot. In a fraction of a second, the dot expanded, and all the matter instantly filled what is now our universe. The event marked the beginning. -
Sep 13, 1543
The Heliocentric Model
Astronomers had speculated about heliocentrism (the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around) since ancient times, but in 1543 Copernicus was the first person to actually demonstrate the math behind the idea to prove it was a viable concept. -
Sep 13, 1559
The Movement of the Stars and Planets
It’s tough to wade through a couple thousand years of ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Mayan and Persian astronomical history to pick out the highlights, so I’ going to cheat and roll all of their achievements up into one entry. Maybe if their civilisations hadn’t died out they would have got a better spot on this list, but because they couldn’t keep their empires together the ancient world gets stuck with the number ten spot. -
Telescope
A telescope is an optical instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light). The first known practical telescopes were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 1600s, by using glass lenses. They found use in both terrestrial applications and astronomy. -
Kepler’s Laws
In 1609, a German astronomer named Johannes Kepler told the world that planets moved around the sun on elliptical routes, not in perfect circles as was commonly believed. Yeah, you know science can be boring when ellipses instead of circles is one of its most important discoveries. -
The Moons of Jupiter
Galileo, arguably the most important scientist ever, used a fancy telescope he half invented and half stole the idea for to discover four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. They were the first moons of another planet to be spotted, making them a landmark discovery. More importantly, we recently discovered that The Moons of Jupiter would make a sweet band name. -
Gravity
Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and physicist, is considered the greatest scientist of all time. Among his many discoveries, the most important is probably his law of universal gravitation. In 1664, Newton figured out that gravity is the force that draws objects toward each other. It explained why things fall down and why the planets orbit around the Sun. -
Herschel’s Map
From 1780 to 1834, telescope maker William Herschel and his sister Caroline systematically mapped the heavens, charting thousands of stars and nebulae in the process. He also discovered Uranus, and if astronomers had stuck with his proposed name of Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) we would have been saved centuries of terrible jokes. -
The Theory of Relativity
Albert Einstein, a German scientist you may have heard of, proposed his theory of relativity in 1915. Summed up, the theory states that mass can warp both space and time, which allows large masses like starsto bend light. It’s trippy . -
The Expanding Universe
Edwin Hubble gave the astronomy world a one-two punch of knowledge between 1924 and 1929. Not only was he the first to discover other galaxies, but by tracking their movement he learned that they are moving away from us (and the ones farther away are moving faster), which was the first evidence we had to suggest that the universe is expanding. -
Radio Astronomy
Remember when radio was all the rage in the entertainment world? Of course you don’t, you’re not 80 years old. But in the world of astronomy radio is still important today, thanks to a discovery by Karl Jansky in 1931. His experiments with radio waves led him to find signals coming from the centre of the galaxy, and he’s considered the founding father of radio astronomy as a result. -
Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
It was a pair of radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. CMBR is a type of radiation that’s present in very small quantities (hence the term background) all throughout space, and is believed to be leftover from when the universe was in a very early stage of growth. -
Exoplanets
After discovering the various planets and non-planetary objects in our solar system, astronomers began looking at other stars in attempts to discover new planets. By analyzing the light spectra coming from distant stars, and also their brightness plotted over time, astronomers have been able to discover a large number of planets, starting in 1992 with the discovery of several planets orbiting a pulsar. -
Extrasolar Planets
An extrasolar planet is one that’s outside of our solar system, and astronomers believed in their existence for a long, long timethat the tools to actually spot one became available; it was only in 1995 when Swiss astronomers Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor discovered a planet in the constellation Pegasus they dubbed 51 Pegasi b. Yeah, astronomers may be great at discovering things but they’re not great at naming them. that the tools to actually spot one became available. -
Dark Matter
Dark matter (different from Dark Energy) is a type of matter that has been proposed to exist to explain gravitational effects within galaxies. When astronomers were able to measure the mass of galaxies and the orbital speed of stars within a galaxy, they noticed discrepancies between the expected results and the calculated results. Thus, a new type of matter was classified as dark matter, which is matter that is simply not detected using current measurement techniques involving. -
International Space Station
The human Journey to Mars begins some 250 miles overhead, as astronauts aboard the International Space Station are working off the Earth for the Earth. The space station's microgravity environment makes research possible that can't be achieved on Earth, leading to breakthroughs in understanding Earth, space and physical and biological sciences.
