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Hans Lippershey: The First Telescope
Hans Lippershey is accredited with the invention of the first telescope in 1608. It is unknown if he built one however. -
Galileo Galilei studies the night sky
Galileo invented the first refracting telescope. Using it, he studied the night sky and discovers the moon has craters and valleys, Jupiter has moons orbiting it, and the phase pattern of Venus proved that the known universe at that time was heliocentric. -
Isaac Newton's reflecting telescope
Isaac Newton discovered when white light goes through a prism, it disperses into a spectrum of visible light, ranging from red to violet and having different wavelengths. He used that information to create the first reflecting telescope with curved mirrors instead of glass lenses. -
William Herschel discovers Uranus
William Herschel wanted to see further into the night sky so he created a bigger version of Newton's telescope. As he looked into the night sky, he and his sister discovered a new planet, Uranus. -
Mount Wilson Observatory
Founded by astronomer George Hale, the enormous reflecting telescope, which was the largest telescope until 1949, was built at a high altitude to better the view into the universe. Red-shifts of galaxies were discovered by Edwin Hubble. -
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble discovered that the "nebulae" at that time were actually galaxies and that the universe was expanding. He analyzed the red-shift to analyze the speed and distance. -
Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, and Cosmic Background Radiation
After building a radio telescope/antenna, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the first evidence of the Big Bang theory, Cosmic Background Radiation. In 1978, the both earned Nobel Prizes. -
The Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope is still in operation. It was built and launched to discover the universe in great detail. The Hubble Deep Field is an image the telescope captured and shows 3000 galaxies in the depths of space. Dark energy, the energy between the galaxies, was also discovered. -
W-MAP
As the more advanced version of Penzias and Wilson's telescope, W-MAP analyzes Cosmic Background Radiation in detail. It discovered that there were fluctuations in the temperatures of CBR, dark energy made 71.4% of the universe, and determined that the universe was 13.7 billion years old. -
New Planets Wanted: Kepler Telescope
The recently launched telescope's goal is to discover Earth-like planets orbiting around other stars, and that can support life. The planet Kepler-186f was discovered in 2015. It is around the size of Earth, has water, and is in a habitable zone of a star like our Sun.
