Timeline of stellar astronomy

Timeline of stellar astronomy

Timeline of stellar astronomy

134 BC - Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent luminosities

1596 - David Fabricius notices that Mira's brightness varies

1672 - Geminiano Montanari notices that Algol's brightness varies

1686 - Gottfried Kirch notices that Chi Cygni's brightness varies

1718 - Edmund Halley discovers stellar proper motions by comparing his astrometric measurements with those of the Greeks

1782 - John Goodricke notices that the brightness variations of Algol are periodic and proposes that it is partially eclipsed by a body moving around it

1784 - Edward Piggot discovers the first Cepheid variable star

1838 - Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Struve, and Friedrich Bessel measure stellar parallaxes

1844 - Friedrich Bessel explains the wobbling motions of Sirius and Procyon by suggesting that these stars have dark companions

1906 - Arthur Eddington begins his statistical study of stellar motions

1908 - Henrietta Leavitt discovers the Cepheid period-luminosity relation

1910 - Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell study the relation between magnitudes and spectral types of stars

1924 - Arthur Eddington develops the main sequence mass-luminosity relationship

1929 - George Gamow proposes hydrogen fusion as the energy source for stars

1938 - Hans Bethe and Carl von Weizsacker detail the proton-proton chain and CNO cycle in stars

1939 - Rupert Wildt realizes the importance of the negative hydrogen ion for stellar opacity

1952 - Walter Baade distinguishes between Cepheid I and Cepheid II variable stars

1953 - Fred Hoyle predicts a carbon-12 resonance to allow stellar triple alpha reactions at reasonable stellar interior temperatures

1961 - Chushiro Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of fully convective stars

1963 - Fred Hoyle and William Fowler conceive the idea of supermassive stars

1964 - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman develop a general relativistic theory of stellar pulsations and show that supermassive stars are subject to a general relativistic instability

1967 - Gerry Neugebauer and Eric Becklin discover the Becklin-Neugebauer object at 10 microns