Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Humans have been gazing at stars and other objects in the night sky for thousands of years, as is evident in the naming of many constellations, notably the largely Greek names used today. Hans Lippershey , a German-Dutch spectacle maker, is commonly credited as being the first to invent the optical telescope .
The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day 'tropical' or 'solar' year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun. The reform advanced the date by 10 days: Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 ...
The emission line is caused by an element's giving out light, and British astronomer Norman Lockyer concludes that it is an element unknown on Earth. He calls it helium, from the Greek word for the Sun. Nearly 30 years later, helium is found on Earth.
At the end of this epoch, the spherical volume of space which will become the observable universe is about 300 light-years in radius, baryonic matter density is on the order of 4 grams per m 3 (about 0.3% of sea level air density)—however, most energy at this time is in electromagnetic radiation. Photon epoch: 10 s ~ 370 ka: 10 9 K ~ 4000 K
c. 16th century BCE – Mesopotamian cosmology has a flat, circular Earth enclosed in a cosmic ocean. [1]c. 15th–11th century BCE – The Rigveda of Hinduism has some cosmological hymns, particularly in the late book 10, notably the Nasadiya Sukta which describes the origin of the universe, originating from the monistic Hiranyagarbha or "Golden Egg".
2005 – First light at SALT, the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, with a hexagonal primary mirror of 11.1 by 9.8 meters. 2007 – First light at Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC), in Spain, the largest optical telescope in the world with an effective diameter of 10.4 meters.
1989 – Margaret Geller and John Huchra discover the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 500 million light years long and 200 million wide, but only 15 million light years thick. 1990 – Michael Rowan-Robinson and Tom Broadhurst discover that the IRAS galaxy IRAS F10214+4724 is the brightest known object in the Universe.
Astronomical chronology, or astronomical dating, is a technical method of dating events or artifacts that are associated with astronomical phenomena.Written records of historical events that include descriptions of astronomical phenomena have done much to clarify the chronology of the Ancient Near East; works of art which depict the configuration of the stars and planets and buildings which ...