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Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei (/ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ oʊ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ /, US also / ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l iː oʊ-/; Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛːi]) or mononymously as Galileo, was a Florentine astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath.
Scheiner argued that what appeared to be spots on the Sun were in fact clusters of small moons, thereby trying to deploy one of Galileo's own discoveries as an argument for the Aristotelian model. [ 40 ] [ 41 ] In his Letters on Sunspots Galileo showed how sunspots were nothing like the moons of Jupiter, and the comparison was false.
Galileo began his telescopic observations in the later part of 1609, and by March 1610 was able to publish a small book, The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), describing some of his discoveries: mountains on the Moon, lesser moons in orbit around Jupiter, and the resolution of what had been thought to be very cloudy masses in the sky (nebulae) into collections of stars too faint to see ...
It is important to note that Galileo used the terms planet and star interchangeably, and "both words were correct usage within the prevailing Aristotelian terminology." [ 13 ] At the time of Sidereus Nuncius ' publication, Galileo was a mathematician at the University of Padua and had recently received a lifetime contract for his work in ...
The first major Arabic work of astronomy is the Zij al-Sindh by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. The work contains tables for the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets known at the time. The work is significant as it introduced Ptolemaic concepts into Islamic sciences. This work also marks the turning point in Arabic astronomy.
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]
Nevertheless, Galileo accepted the Copernican theory. [6] A Chinese historian of astronomy, Xi Zezong, has claimed that a "small reddish star" observed near Jupiter in 364 BCE by Chinese astronomer Gan De may have been Ganymede. If true, this might predate Galileo's discovery by around two millennia. [9]
The discoveries of Io and the other Galilean satellites of Jupiter were published in Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610. [1] While the Jovian moons he discovered would later be known as the Galilean satellites, after himself, he proposed the name Medicea Sidera (Medicean Stars) after his new patrons, the de'Medici family of his native ...