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Period: 1564 to
Famous Astronomers
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Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was born in Pisa, Italy. He was an astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is credited with inventing the first telescope in 1609. -
Edmund Halley
Edmund Halley (1656-1742) was born in Haggerston, London. He predicted the return of Halley's comet from commutations he made in the 18th century. Halley's claim to the name stems from his crucial discovery about the nature of the eponymous object. -
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was born in Lincolnshire, England. He is most famous for his work on forces, specifically gravity. He developed the theories of gravitation in 1666, and presented his three laws of motion in 1686. -
Frederick William Herschel
Frederick William Herschel (1738-1822) was born in Hanover, Germany. He was an astronomer, technical expert, and composer. In 1781, he discovered the planet Uranus. It was the first planet discovered since the beginning of history. -
Annie Jump Cannon
Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), known as the "Census taker of the sky", classified around 350,000 stars manually. She developed the Harvard spectral system in the 1890's, which is used to classify stars today. -
Henrietta Swann Leavitt
Henrietta Swann Leavitt (1868-1921) was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She was one of several women working at Harvard College identifying images of variable stars on photographic plates. She discovered that the brightness of the star cepheid variable was related to how often it pulsed. She also found around 2.400 variable stars between 1907 and 1921. -
Clyde William Tombaugh
Clyde William Tombaugh (1906-1997) was born in Streator, Illinois. He was an astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto in 1930. He was also one of the supporters of further research to better understand UFOs. -
Shrinivas Kulkarni
Shrinivas Kulkarni (1956-Present) was born in India. He was the first to discover the millisecond pulsar (MSP). -
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943-Present) was born in Belfast, Ireland. She detected pulsars (spinning neutron stars that pulse because beams of light emitted are only seen when facing Earth) in 1967. -
Beatrice Tinsley
Beatrice Tinsley (1941-1981) was born in Chester, England. She was the first female professor of Astronomy at Yale, and she was considered the leading expert on the evolution of galaxies by the time she died in 1981.