Timeline of solar system astronomy
Timeline of solar system astronomy
- 2137 BC, October 22 - Chinese astronomers record a solar eclipse\n* 586 BC - Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse\n* 350 BC - Aristotle argues for a spherical Earth using lunar eclipses and other observations\n* 280 BC - Aristarchus uses the size of the Earth's shadow on the Moon to estimate that the Moon's radius is one-third that of the Earth\n* 200 BC - Eratosthenes uses shadows to determine that the radius of the Earth is roughly 6,400 km\n* 150 BC - Hipparchus uses parallax to determine that the distance to the Moon is roughly 380,000 km\n* 134 BC - Hipparchus discovers the precession of the equinoxes\n* 1512 - Nicholas Copernicus first states his heliocentric theory in Commentariolus\n* 1543 - Nicholas Copernicus shows that his heliocentric theory simplifies planetary motion tables in De Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium\n* 1577 - Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena\n* 1609 - Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion\n* 1610 - Galileo Galilei discovers Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io\n* 1610 - Galileo Galilei sees Saturn's planetary rings but does not recognize that they are rings\n* 1619 - Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion\n* 1655 - Giovanni Cassini discovers Jupiter's great red spot\n* 1656 - Christian Huygens identifies Saturn's rings as rings and discovers Titan and the Orion Nebula\n* 1665 - Giovanni Cassini determines the rotational speeds of Jupiter, Mars, and Venus\n* 1672 - Giovanni Cassini discovers Rhea\n* 1672 - Jean Richer and Giovanni Cassini measure the astronomical unit to be about 138,370,000 km\n* 1675 - Ole Rømer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate that the speed of light is about 227,000 km/s\n* 1705 - Edmund Halley publicly predicts the periodicity of Halley's Comet and computes its expected path of return in 1758\n* 1715 - Edmund Halley calculates the shadow path of a solar eclipse\n* 1716 - Edmund Halley suggests a high-precision measurement of the Sun-Earth distance by timing the transit of Venus\n* 1758 - Johann Palitzsch observes the return of Halley's comet\n* 1766 - Johann Titius finds the Titius-Bode rule for planetary distances\n* 1772 - Johann Bode publicizes the Titius-Bode rule for planetary distances\n* 1781 - William Herschel discovers Uranus during a telescopic survey of the northern sky\n* 1796 - Pierre Laplace states his nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system from a spinning nebula of gas and dust\n* 1801 - Giuseppe Piazzi discovers the asteroid Ceres\n* 1802 - Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovers the asteroid Pallas\n* 1821 - Alexis Bouvard detects irregularities in the orbit of Uranus\n* 1825 - Pierre Laplace completes his study of gravitation, the stability of the solar system, tides, the precession of the equinoxes, the libration of the Moon, and Saturn's rings in Mécanique Celeste\n* 1843 - John Adams predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus\n* 1846 - Urbain Le Verrier predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus\n* 1846 - Johann Galle discovers Neptune\n* 1846 - William Lassell discovers Triton\n* 1849 - Edouard Roche finds the limiting radius of tidal destruction and tidal creation for a body held together only by its self gravity, called the Roche limit, and uses it to explain why Saturn's rings do not condense into a satellite\n* 1856 - James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates that a solid ring around Saturn would be torn apart by gravitational forces and argues that Saturn's rings consist of a multitude of tiny satellites\n* 1866 - Giovanni Schiaparelli realizes that meteor streams occur when the Earth passes through the orbit of a comet that has left debris along its path\n* 1906 - Max Wolf discovers the Trojan asteroid Achilles\n* 1930 - Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto\n* 1930 - Seth Nicholson measures the surface temperature of the Moon\n* 1950 - Jan Oort suggests the presence of a cometary Oort cloud\n* 1951 - Gerard Kuiper argues for an annular reservoir of comets between 40-100 astronomical units from the Sun, the Kuiper belt\n* 1959 - Luna 3 sends a picture of the far side of the Moon\n* 1977 - James Elliot discovers the rings of Uranus during a stellar occultation experiment on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory\n* 1978 - James Christy discovers Charon\n* 1978 - Peter Goldreich and Scott Tremaine present a Boltzmann equation model of planetary-ring dynamics for indestructible spherical ring particles that do not self-gravitate and find a stability requirement relation between ring optical depth and particle normal restitution coefficient\n* 1988 - Martin Duncan, Thomas Quinn, and Scott Tremaine demonstrate that short-period comets come primarily from the Kuiper Belt and not the Oort cloud
Category:Science timelines
