-
Sep 13, 1543
The Heliocentric Model 1543
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. That’ll learn ‘em. -
Kepler’s Laws 1609
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 1610
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. -
Herschel’s Map 1780
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 1915
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 stars to bend light. It’s trippy stuff. -
Exoplanets 1922
An exoplanet (BrE /ˈek.səʊˌplæn.ɪt/ AmE /ˌek.soʊˈplæn.ɪt/)[3] or extrasolar planet is a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun. Starting in 1988, and as of 1 September 2016, there have been 3,518 exoplanets in 2,635 planetary systems and 595 multiple planetary systems confirmed -
The Expanding Universe 1924
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 1931
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 -
Extrasolar Planets 1955
An extrasolar planet is one that’s outside of our solar system, and astronomers believed in their existence for a long, long time. Yet, it wasn’t until recently that 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. -
Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation 1964
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. -
Dark Energy
As we’ll discuss later in this article, it has been discovered using the Hubble constant and measurements of supernovae of distant stars that the universe is not contracting, nor is it static (as Einstein thought), but instead, the universe is expanding, and the expansion is speeding up. -
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.
