Questions tagged [history]
Questions regarding the history of astronomy, including discoveries and scientists.
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Planets Named After Roman Gods, Except Earth
I’ve looked this up, but not necessarily sure the internet has the right answer. Why are the planets in our solar system named after Roman gods, except Earth, and why is only one of the nine planets ...
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Why did the dust between the planets disappear during the birth of the solar system?
I'm catching up on my childhood mistakes. One of them was the "nuclear flash", the enormous explosion when the sun ignited. Apparently, this did not happen as the ignition of the sun was a ...
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Where can I get historical data of tropical longitude of Delta Cancri
I need historical data of tropical longitude of Delta Cancri.
Where can I get it. As of now it is approximately 128 Deg from Vernal Equinox.
Where can I get it's historical data, say from 5000 BC to ...
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How did the temperature of the solar system evolve?
As a child, I've read that stars ignite during a so-called "nuclear flash". I understood this as a very violent outburst of energy from the sun, causing all dust between the protoplanets to ...
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Comet and eclipse
It seems likely the 12P/Pons-Brook comet will be visible at the same time as the 2024-04-08 American eclipse.
How unusual is this and what can science say about what will appear?
What other historical ...
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is there any site with historical radiotelescope data about observations 21 cm line Hydrogen (1.42 GHz)?
I am looking for an open source that contain historical raw data or (meta)data about historical observations of the 21 cm line hydrogen made via radio telescopes.
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When did astronomers accept that fixed stars aren't fixed and are at different distances?
Was it when heliocentric model was spreading in the whole world? I saw a model of the solar system that was made in the 18th century where the sun was in the middle and the planets and comets around ...
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How did scientists decide the boundary of the Milky Way at Edwin Hubble times?
I know Edwin Hubble used Cepheid variables to prove the Andromeda Galaxy is not part of the Milky Way. But how did scientists at that time decide the boundary of the Milky Way?
And how did they find ...
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What did Galileo believe stars were?
Did he believe stars were attached to the sphere of fixed stars, or did he believe they were suns or did he believe stars weren't attached to anything but just points of light?
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How plausible is it for legends about the Pleiades to be this ancient?
There's a tangent at the beginning of this video on the Epic of Gilgamesh briefly talking about an oddity where most ancient cultures have stories about the Pleiades star cluster, often describing ...
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How did we figure out that Stars become red giants and when did we find out that they will?
I always hear that the Sun will be one but never when we found that out or how.
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What telescope is Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski holding in this April 1964 photo at the Jagiellonian University Observatory in Krakow?
The following questions touch on Kordylewski clouds
Can dark matter accumulate at Lagrange points?
Are dust-dust collisions necessary to explain Kordylewski clouds at Earth-Moon L4/5? Aren't the ...
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Is the Sun hotter today, in terms of absolute temperature (i.e., NOT total luminosity), than it was in the distant past?
I am constantly reading that the Sun is at least 20% 'hotter', in terms of total radiation/luminosity, than it was a few million years after its formation (i.e., after the Hayashi stage...)
But what ...
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Why did it take so long to invent telescopes given glass was used 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia?
Is a telescope difficult to make? Does glass have to be polished and shaped very precisely? Or is a device using two or more lenses to magnify things just not obvious?
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How do the phases of Venus prove heliocentrism?
I have been doing research about the Copernican Revolution, and one of the main arguments that caused many astronomers to change their minds was Galileo's observation of all phases of Venus.
The proof ...
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Which telescope(s) did Charles Messier use to catalog his 110 objects?
Charles Messier is known for (among other things) a catalog of "Messier objects".
Neither article shows an image of "Messier's telescope", though the latter includes:
Since these ...
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Credible description of point sources and point spread functions in astronomy
I am looking for a credible source (or even the original sources) that describe point sources and/or point spread functions (PSFs) on astronomy.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia pages (point source, PSF) ...
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Was Galileo expecting to see so many stars?
Beginner amateur here. I see mentioned many times that Galileo was surprised to see the moons of Jupiter and all that their existence proved, i.e. the Earth not necessarily being the center of ...
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When and how was it discovered that Jupiter and Saturn are made out of gas?
Was it due to appearance only or spectroscopic methods were used? Venus also has a thick cloud cover, how was it determined to be a rocky planet?
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What is this drawing about in "kitab al bulhan"?
Kitab al bulhan or "book of surprises" is medieval Persian manuscript written in Arabic.
According to Wikipedia:
The contents include subjects on astronomy, astrology and geomancy, ...
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About Year Zero
It is said that, in part due to a poor grasp of mathematics (the number zero to be precise) our forebears, when they developed the calendar went from 1 BC/BCE to 1 AD/CE. Year Zero is missing - it ...
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First time mention of coplanarity between Solar Systems planets
When comparing Galileo, Copernicus and Hypathia models to describe the solar system, each of them agree on coplanarity, based on their representations. Anyways, it was not until Kepler and Newton that ...
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What's the issue with Olbers' paradox?
I'm not quite grasping the reasoning behind Olbers' Paradox, or why an eternal, non-expanding and spatially infinite universe would be incompatible with a dark sky. For simplicity, let's suppose that ...
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What is the brightest nameless star?
Bright stars in the night sky traditionally have their own proper names, like "Sirus" or "Canopus".
Most stars don't have names, but instead catalogue identifiers, like the Bayer ...
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Is pointing a telescope at a random place a viable astronomical strategy?
Recently I happened to be on the MAST portal, looking at jwst data. I happened to come across 2 interesting targets, “random place” and “another random place”
This got me thinking. It’s almost ...
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First satellite of an asteroid (or double asteroid) ever imaged by delay-Doppler radar?
In comments about my previous bounty on the Space SE question Which deep-space spacecraft flew closest by Earth during a gravitational assist?, I started to look at the Galileo mission and ran across ...
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Did de Sitter expect to disprove Ritz theory only with visual binaries?
Walter Ritz’s emission theory stated that some fraction of the velocity of an object was added to the speed of light emitted from it. Willem de Sitter pointed out a problem with this in the case of a ...
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How was the First Point of Aries measured in ancient times?
According to Wikipedia, usage of the Sun's position as the basis for a celestial coordinate system dates back at least to Babylonian times, and the current "First Point of Aries" system ...
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Which world did Carl Sagan know of with a million moons?
I recently read Carl Sagan's The Cosmic Connection. In it, he begins the seventh chapter with a series of claims to depict the universe as "vast and awesome."
I'm particularly interested in ...
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Early Milky Way depictions after Herschel?
We are all familiar with the 1785 drawing of the Galaxy by William Herschel, often quoted as the "First drawing of the Milky Way"
Are there any other such historical drawings after this one?...
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At what point in history was the idea of planets being spit out by the sun abandoned?
For context, at some point during the 20th century (and maybe earlier as well), the most popular planet formation theory and the one that was taught at (at least some) schools was the theory that the ...
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History, significance and "drama" (if any) of T-Tauri stars, especially the early bits?
In this answer to Can I write a systematic review as an undergraduate and get it published in a journal? in Academia SE I recounted my memory of an experience from circa 1980:
I had an initially ...
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What else can we learn from a Foucault pendulum? Have they ever been used to determine anything more than that the Earth rotates on its axis?
Background
Each semester we have to make up projects for each course. This semester I took Cosmology and Astrophysics and we covered a vast amount of topics, from luminosity of stars to Einstein's ...
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How much energy to shorten a synodic month by about 1.56%?
Suppose the moon underwent a single, massive, large-object bombardment event. About what number (or range) of about what mean mass of objects could shorten the synodic month by about 1.5633%?
(Assume ...
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Doubt about a computation in Jules Verne
In his Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais dans l'Afrique australe (The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa), Jules Verne describes in some detail the geodetic ...
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Empirical findings, Occam's razor, and the replacement of Ptolemaism by heliocentrism [closed]
C. S. Lewis's book The Discarded Image is about how to understand and how not to misunderstand medieval literature. In some parts he explicitly contrasts medieval with modern culture. In one of those ...
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Why orient a refracting telescope to the North?
I'm a french Guide of french military heritage. I have to prepare visit about "L'observatoire de la Marine, moulins du faouëdic" (Former windmill which served as an astronomical and ...
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Examples of the oldest "precoveries"; objects that were first discovered in recent data but then looking back are confirmed in much older data
Example from Ars Technica's Radio astronomers scouring the archives spotted black hole devouring a star:
Astronomers found another TDE in 2020 (dubbed AT 2019qiz), which provided the first direct ...
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How long would it take to realize there are "star-like objects" (i.e. planets) that change position in respect to the "fixed stars"?
If you were using unaided observations and were unfamiliar with astronomy (and maybe just pen and paper for recording anything), how long should it take to notice that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter ...
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Did astronomers ever use photographic plate rotation along with alt-az mounts?
The video Earth's Rotation Visualized in a Timelapse of the Milky Way Galaxy - 4K (linked below) and discussion below this answer to Why does a timelapse video of a stationary Milky Way make the ...
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Why are there 12 zodiac signs?
My friend and I are arguing whether it is because there are 12 months or there are 12 constellations along this path. It makes more sense to me that, since there are 12 months, they divided the path ...
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What was "wrong" about the motion of Neptune in 1984?
The cover story of the March 1984 issue of RUN, a popular computing magazine, was written by noted astronomer Charles T. Kowal. In the article, he describes how he uses his home computer, a Commodore ...
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Was lunar libration first observed or first predicted? In either case, who was the responsible party?
How old is the idea of the far side of the Moon? got me thinking that as soon as we see the moon librate we have to come to terms with there being even more of it we can't see.
The Moon's libration is ...
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How old is the idea of the far side of the Moon?
The far side of the Moon is the side which always faces away from the Earth, due to tidal locking. Due to libration, about 18% of this far side can be seen at one point or another through telescopes.
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How was the speed of the Sun (around the Milky Way Galaxy) calculated?
The Sun travels around the Milky Way Galaxy with a speed of 220 km/s. The question is: where did this value come from? Is there any article about the calculation?
Reformulated question: What are the ...
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What does 's' or 'ds' or $ds^2$ mean in the Schwarzschild equation(s)? [closed]
And:
These are from Wikipedia on Schwarzschild metric, Derivation of the Schwarzschild metric and the last is from Science Direct, Schwarzschild metric.
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What do "P" and "F" mean in the compass legend of Carrington's sunspot drawing?
In Richard Carrington's drawing of sunspots, he has a compass labeled "N", "P", "S", and "F". If "N" is North and "S" is South, what do &...
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How exactly was Giovanni Cassini able to measure the distance to Mars?
Recently learned that Cassini was able to calculate the distance to Mars quite well using parallax in 1672. I was surprised, since even at opposition of Mars, the parallax (with respect to the Earth's ...
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Why does the difference between terrestrial times and universal time, $\Delta T$, have such a strange behaviour?
I was reading about ancient astronomy, and one of the main phenomena described is eclipses. Now, I read this 2016 paper by Stephenson, Morrison and Hohenkerk, in which they determine the values of the ...
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Was the Nobel prize for gravitational waves handed out based on a hand-drawn theoretical curve? Has the data been fit more rigorously now?
In Sabine Hossenfelder's November 2019 video "Have we really measured gravitational waves?" (transcript, video), Sabine mentions the now famous image of the generally agreed-upon-to-be-very-...
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