HackingTheUniverse

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Frederick William Herschel was born in 1738 in Hanover, Germany and was an astronomer and musician. He built over four hundred telescopes, including one that had a 40 foot focal length and 50 inch mirror. He observed and catalogued over 2400 astronomical objects. He discovered Uranus, two of it’s moons and two moons of Saturn. [...]

Gamma rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, or waves of photons, that have a very short wavelength and corresponding high frequency. They are associated with the decay of high energy states in atomic nuclei and are considered to be a high energy form of radiation. When stars that are burning out at the end [...]

A planet made of diamond – [manchester.ac.uk] A once-massive star that’s been transformed into a small planet made of diamond: that is what University of Manchester astronomers think they’ve found in the Milky Way. The discovery has been made by an international research team, led by Professor Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in [...]

Eudoxus was born around -0408 in Cnidus (now in Turkey) as a Greek and was a mathematician and an astronomer. He learned mathematics from Archytas, astronomy in Egypt, philosophy from Plato and was a teacher to Aristotle. Eudoxus created the first concept of spherical astronomy and planetary motion. He worked on the theory of proportion, [...]

Christiaan Huygens was born in 1629 in The Hague, Netherlands (then known as the Dutch Republic) and was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He advanced the art of grinding lenses and building telescopes and in 1655 discovered that Titan was a moon of Saturn and in the next year became the first to propose that [...]

Hans Lippershey, a Dutch lensmaker has been given primary credit for making the first recorded optical telescope in 1608, although there is evidence that other telescopes or “looking glasses” existed prior to his work. PRECURSOR: 0085 – Ptolemy 0800 – astrolabe invented 0965 – Alhazen wrote “Book of Optics” and investigated using curved mirrors as [...]

Hipparchus was born around -0190 in Nicea, Greece, which is now part of Turkey. He was a mathematician and an accomplished astronomer who has generally been credited with observing and measuring the precession of the equinoxes, which is a small shift in the apparent position of stars that is caused by a wobble in the [...]

Pierre-Simon Laplace was born in France in 1749 and was a mathematician and astronomer. His greatest work was a five volume set called, “Celestial Mechanics” which he wrote over a twenty six year period from 1799 to 1825. In addition to summarizing the state of astronomy at the time, he transformed Newton’s geometrical mechanics to [...]

al-Battani (Abu Abdallah Mohammad ibn Jabir Al-Battani) was born around 850 in Turkey (then Mesopotamia) and was a mathematician and astronomer. He advanced the accuracy of astronomical observations beyond that established in Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, including the motion of five planets and the length of our solar year. He catalogued 489 stars. He pioneered the use [...]

Francoise Arago was born in 1786 in France and was an astronomer, physicist and mathematician. Some of his work complemented similar work by Faraday and Fresnel. His confirmation of a bright spot of light at the center of a circular shadow helped confirm Fresnel’s wave theory of light and is now known as “Arago’s spot”. [...]