-
Danish astronomer, astrologer, and alchemist. His measurements indicated that "new stars", stellae novae, now called supernovae, moved beyond the Moon, and he was able to show that comets were not atmospheric phenomena, as was previously thought. He was the last major astronomer before the invention of the telescope. -
Galileo Galilei is known as a pioneering astronomer. His telescopic observations led to the discovery of Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus, and the mountains on the Moon. -
Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer. He discovered planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus, a line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times, and the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its orbit's semi-major axis. -
Edmond Halley is a scientist known for predicting the return of the comet that now bears his name, Halley's Comet. He mapped the stars in the Southern Hemisphere. He also discovered that the stars have motion. -
Isaac Newton is known for his contributions to science. Universal Law of Gravitation- explains why objects attract each other, including the force that keeps planets in orbit. -
He was a French astronomer. He published an astronomical catalogue consisting of 110 nebulae and star clusters, which came to be known as the Messier objects, referred to with the letter M and their number between 1 and 110. He discovered 14 comets. -
Was a German astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet. -
She was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. She is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. -
She was an American astronomer. Leavitt discovered how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies leading to understanding of the scale and nature of the universe. -
The Swiss American astronomer discovered the mass of all the stars in the Coma cluster of galaxies provided only about 1 percent of the mass needed to keep the galaxies from escaping the cluster's gravitational pull. Known as the "Father of Dark Matter".