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The first astronomical texts that were translated into Arabic were of Indian [2] and Persian origin. [3] The most notable was Zij al-Sindhind, a zij produced by Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Fazārī and Yaʿqūb ibn Ṭāriq, who translated an 8th-century Indian astronomical work after 770, with the assistance of Indian astronomers who were at the court of caliph Al-Mansur.
The ancient Hebrews, like all the ancient peoples of the Near East, believed the sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets and stars embedded in it. [5] In biblical cosmology, the firmament is the vast solid dome created by God during his creation of the world to divide the primal sea into upper and lower portions so that the dry land ...
The astronomical unit is typically used for stellar system scale distances, such as the size of a protostellar disk or the heliocentric distance of an asteroid, whereas other units are used for other distances in astronomy. The astronomical unit is too small to be convenient for interstellar distances, where the parsec and light-year are
Aristarchus of Samos had speculated about heliocentrism in Ancient Greece; Martianus Capella taught in the early Middle Ages that both Mercury and Venus orbit the Sun, while the Moon, the Sun and the other planets orbit the Earth; [10] in Al-Andalus, Arzachel proposed that Mercury orbits the Sun, and heliocentric astronomers worked in the ...
The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. The square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. [82]
The Tusi couple, a mathematical device invented by the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din Tusi to model the not perfectly circular motions of the planets. Science in the medieval Islamic world was the science developed and practised during the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Córdoba, the Abbadids of Seville, the Samanids, the Ziyarids and the Buyids in ...
Ptolemy's version was a derivative of the astrolabe and the purpose of this rudimentary device was to measure the meridian angle of the sun. Islamic astronomers in the Middle Ages improved upon these ideas and constructed quadrants throughout the Middle East, in observatories such as Marageh, Rey and Samarkand.
In December 2012, NASA announced that in late August 2012, Voyager 1, at about 122 au (1.83 × 10 10 km; 1.13 × 10 10 mi) from the Sun, entered a new region they called the "magnetic highway", an area still under the influence of the Sun but with some dramatic differences.