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The International Astronomical Union (IAU) eventually started officially approving names in the late 1970s. With the explosion of discoveries in the 21st century, new moons have once again started to be left unnamed even after their numbering, beginning with Jupiter LI and Jupiter LII in 2010.
17 August 1970 First Venus lander and the first spacecraft to "soft" land on another planet (with some data returned from the surface) [18] [161] [162] Luna 16: 12 September 1970 First robotic lunar sample return [10] [163] Zond 8: 20 October 1970 Lunar flyby and return to Earth [46] [164] [165] Luna 17/Lunokhod 1: 10 November 1970 First remote ...
Italian polymath Galileo Galilei was an early user and made prolific discoveries, including the phases of Venus, which definitively disproved the arrangement of spheres in the Ptolemaic system. Galileo also discovered that the Moon was cratered, that the Sun was marked with sunspots, and that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it. [13]
1967 – Solar neutrino problem found; 1967 – Pulsars (rotating neutron stars) discovered; 1968 – Experimental evidence for quarks found; 1968 – Vera Rubin: Dark matter theories; 1970–73 – Standard Model of elementary particles invented; 1971 – Helium 3 superfluidity; 1971–75 – Michael Fisher, Kenneth G. Wilson, and Leo Kadanoff ...
There are 293 confirmed moons in our cosmic neighborhood. By studying these worlds, astronomers hope to learn about ancient asteroid collisions, space volcanoes, and the origins of life itself.
1577 – Tycho Brahe records the position of the Great Comet of that year as viewed from Uraniborg (in the island Hven, near Copenhagen) and compares it with that observed by Thadaeus Hagecius from Prague at the same time, giving deliberate consideration to the movement of the Moon. It was discovered that, while the comet was in approximately ...
Aristarchus' 3rd century BC calculations on the relative sizes of the Sun, Earth, and Moon, from a 10th-century AD Greek copy Around 280 BCE, Aristarchus of Samos offers the first definite discussion of the possibility of a heliocentric cosmos , [ 39 ] and uses the size of the Earth's shadow on the Moon to estimate the Moon's orbital radius at ...
Some models predict that there may have been several generations of Galilean satellites in Jupiter's early history. Each generation of moons to have formed would have spiraled into Jupiter and been destroyed, due to tidal interactions with Jupiter's proto-satellite disk, with new moons forming from the remaining debris. By the time the present ...