Timeline of solar system astronomy
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Timeline of solar system astronomy
- 2137 BC, October 22 - Chinese astronomers record a solar eclipse
- 586 BC - Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse
- 350 BC - Aristotle argues for a spherical Earth using lunar eclipses and other observations
- 280 BC - Aristarchus uses the size of the Earth's shadow on the Moon to estimate that the Moon's radius is one-third that of the Earth
- 200 BC - Eratosthenes uses shadows to determine that the radius of the Earth is roughly 6,400 km
- 150 BC - Hipparchus uses parallax to determine that the distance to the Moon is roughly 380,000 km
- 134 BC - Hipparchus discovers the precession of the equinoxes
- 1512 - Nicholas Copernicus first states his heliocentric theory in Commentariolus
- 1543 - Nicholas Copernicus shows that his heliocentric theory simplifies planetary motion tables in De Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium
- 1577 - Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena
- 1609 - Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion
- 1610 - Galileo Galilei discovers Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io
- 1610 - Galileo Galilei sees Saturn's planetary rings but does not recognize that they are rings
- 1619 - Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion
- 1655 - Giovanni Cassini discovers Jupiter's great red spot
- 1656 - Christian Huygens identifies Saturn's rings as rings and discovers Titan and the Orion Nebula
- 1665 - Giovanni Cassini determines the rotational speeds of Jupiter, Mars, and Venus
- 1672 - Giovanni Cassini discovers Rhea
- 1672 - Jean Richer and Giovanni Cassini measure the astronomical unit to be about 138,370,000 km
- 1675 - Ole Romer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate that the speed of light is about 227,000 km/s
- 1705 - Edmund Halley publicly predicts the periodicity of Halley's Comet and computes its expected path of return in 1758
- 1715 - Edmund Halley calculates the shadow path of a solar eclipse
- 1716 - Edmund Halley suggests a high-precision measurement of the Sun-Earth distance by timing the transit of Venus
- 1758 - Johann Palitzsch observes the return of Halley's comet
- 1766 - Johann Titius finds the Titius-Bode rule for planetary distances
- 1772 - Johann Bode publicizes the Titius-Bode rule for planetary distances
- 1781 - William Herschel discovers Uranus during a telescopic survey of the northern sky
- 1796 - Pierre Laplace states his nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system from a spinning nebula of gas and dust
- 1801 - Giuseppe Piazzi discovers the asteroid Ceres
- 1802 - Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovers the asteroid Pallas
- 1821 - Alexis Bouvard detects irregularities in the orbit of Uranus
- 1825 - Pierre Laplace completes his study of gravitation, the stability of the solar system, tides, the precession of the equinoxes, the libration of the Moon, and Saturn's rings in Mecanique Celeste
- 1843 - John Adams predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus
- 1846 - Urbain Le Verrier predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus
- 1846 - Johann Galle discovers Neptune
- 1846 - William Lassell discovers Triton
- 1849 - Edouard Roche finds the limiting radius of tidal destruction and tidal creation for a body held together only by its self gravity, called the Roche limit, and uses it to explain why Saturn's rings do not condense into a satellite
- 1856 - James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates that a solid ring around Saturn would be torn apart by gravitational forces and argues that Saturn's rings consist of a multitude of tiny satellites
- 1866 - Giovanni Schiaparelli realizes that meteor streams occur when the Earth passes through the orbit of a comet that has left debris along its path
- 1906 - Max Wolf discovers the Trojan asteroid Achilles
- 1930 - Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto
- 1930 - Seth Nicholson measures the surface temperature of the Moon
- 1950 - Jan Oort suggests the presence of a cometary Oort cloud
- 1951 - Gerard Kuiper argues for an annular reservoir of comets between 40-100 astronomical units from the Sun, the Kuiper belt
- 1959 - Luna 3 sends a picture of the far side of the Moon
- 1977 - James Elliot discovers the rings of Uranus during a stellar occultation experiment on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory
- 1978 - James Christy discovers Charon
- 1978 - Peter Goldreich and Scott Tremaine present a Boltzmann equation model of planetary-ring dynamics for indestructible spherical ring particles that do not self-gravitate and find a stability requirement relation between ring optical depth and particle normal restitution coefficient
- 1988 - Martin Duncan, Thomas Quinn, and Scott Tremaine demonstrate that short-period comets come primarily from the Kuiper Belt and not the Oort cloud