In 1657, Otto von Guericke pumped the air from two hemispheres and eight horses could not pull them apart.
Amontons found a volume of air shrank as the temperature fell and realized the it would become zero.
In 1774, Joseph Priestley isolated oxyge...
In the 3rd century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos estimated the size and distance of the Moon and Sun, and hypothesized that the Earth and planets rotated around the Sun. This was later known as the heliocentric model of the Solar System.
In the 2nd century BCE, Hipparchus calculated the size and distance of the Moon and discovered the precession of the Earth's axis of rotation; a slow change known as the precession of the equinoxes that occurs on a 26,000 year cycle so that the axis does not always point at the Pole star.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Hipparchus also invented some of the earliest known astronomical devices, such as the astrolabe, and catalogued 1020 stars; which is why most of the constellations of the northern hemisphere derive from Greek astronomy.
The Antikythera mechanism, made between 150 and 80 BCE, was an early analogue computer designed to calculate the location of the Sun, Moon, and planets for a given date. Similarly complex devices were not made again until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks were invented.
The Persian Muslim astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, in his Book of Fixed Stars, described the Andromeda Galaxy in 964 CE.
The SN 1006 supernova, the brightest apparent magnitude stellar event in recorded history, was observed by the Egyptian Arabic astronomer Ali ibn Ridwan and Chinese astronomers in 1006 CE.
During the Renaissance, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system. His work was defended by Galileo Galilei and expanded upon by Johannes Kepler. Kepler was the first to devise a system that correctly described the details of the motion of the planets around the Sun. However, Kepler did not succeed in developing a theory behind the laws he formulated. It was Isaac Newton, with his invention of celestial dynamics and his law of gravitation, who finally explained the motions of the planets in mathematical terms.
Improvements in the size and quality of telescopes led to further discoveries. The English astronomer John Flamsteed catalogued over 3000 stars, while Nicolas Louis de Lacaille produced an extensive star catalogue, the astronomer William Herschel made a detailed catalogue of nebulosities and clusters, and in 1781 discovered the planet Uranus.
Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727), an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer and theologian, was one of the most influential scientists of all time and was a key figure in the scientific revolution. His laws of gravitation and motion were not superseded until Einstein's theory of relativity in 1916.
Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.
F1 = F2 = G (m1 x m2) / R squared
Where F1 and F2 is the force acting between two objects, m1 and m2 are the masses of the two objects and G is the gravitational constant.
