History of Discovery · 8

Histories of Discovery

The great arcs of astronomical discovery — the Copernican Revolution and the histories of the telescope, spectroscopy, radio astronomy, cosmology, exoplanets, gravitational waves, and black holes.

The Copernican RevolutionHistory of discovery
16th–17th century
The shift from an Earth-centred to a Sun-centred cosmos — from Copernicus's heliocentric proposal, through Galileo's telescopic evidence and Kepler's laws of planetary motion, to Newton's gravity that explained them all. The founding revolution of modern astronomy, and the archetype of a scientific revolution.
The History of Black HolesHistory of discovery
From a strange mathematical solution that many thought unphysical, through the theoretical work that made them respectable and the observations that made them real, to the imaging of a black hole's shadow and the star orbits that prove one lurks at the Milky Way's heart.
The History of CosmologyHistory of discovery
From Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding, through the Big Bang and the detection of its afterglow, to the surprise of the accelerating cosmos and the tensions in today's precision measurements. A century in which cosmology became a science.
The History of ExoplanetsHistory of discovery
From the first confirmed planet around another Sun-like star in 1995 — found by the radial-velocity wobble it induced — to the thousands now known, many by the transit method, a field that went in a generation from speculation to a central pursuit of astronomy, driven by ever more sensitive detection methods.
The History of Gravitational WavesHistory of discovery
From Einstein's 1916 prediction that mass in motion should ripple spacetime, through a century of doubt about whether they could ever be detected, to the first direct detection of a black-hole merger in 2015 — and a new way of observing the universe.
The History of Radio AstronomyHistory of discovery
How Karl Jansky's chance detection of radio waves from the Milky Way in the 1930s opened an entirely new window on the universe — leading in time to pulsars, quasars, the cosmic microwave background, and the imaging of a black hole.
The History of SpectroscopyHistory of discovery
How splitting starlight into its colours revealed what the stars are made of — the dark lines in the spectrum betraying the elements present. It was the birth of astrophysics, the moment astronomy became not just where and when but what and how.
The History of the TelescopeHistory of discovery
From Galileo first turning a spyglass on the sky in 1609 — finding craters on the Moon and moons around Jupiter — through William Herschel's reflecting telescopes, one of which discovered Uranus, to the segmented giants and space telescopes of today. Each leap in aperture opened new depths of the universe.

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