5.8 Ancient Astronomers

Eratosthenes

240 BCE

Eratosthenes discovered that the Earth was round and not flat, he also made a map of the known world.

Claudius Ptolemy

150

Claudius Ptolemy developed the geocentric model which was consistent with the Catholic Church's beliefs and therefore was widely accepted. It was replaced by the Copernican heliocentric model.

Nicholaus Copernicus

1508

Copernicus was the first modern European Scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolved around the sun, also referred to as the Heliocentric Model of the Universe

Tycho Brahe

Mar 5, 1590

Tycho Brahe discovered the comet C/1590 E1, which he discovered March 5, 1590.

Johannes Kepler

1609

Most famous for the three laws of planetary motion and demonstrated that planetary orbits are ellipses and not circular.

Isaac Newton

1687

Newton came up with the three laws of motion but especially he focused on Gravitational attraction as a function of the masses of the objects and their existence from one another

Albert Einstein

1916

Einstein developed the special as well as general theories of relativity and the concept of space-time which deals with the behavior of large objects in the universe.