After doing the reading in the science section of the ways of the world, I came across Galileo Galilei. I was really interested on his scientific acheivement of making the telescope and discovering more about the solar system. So I decided to do some extensive research on the topic to answer some questions that were wandering in my head.
Galileo developed a more advanced telescope, which he saw sunspots with. With that, he discovered new stars such as Jupiter.
His discoery lead to the findings that all planets revolved around the sun and that there was a gravitational force because some of the planets seemed to dissapear from him when they actually revolved somewhere else.
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Cal,
ReplyDeleteJupiter is not a star. Also, Galileo was not the person to discover it. Jupiter is large enough, and close enough to Earth, to be visible by the unaided eye. Therefore, anyone who happened to look up into the sky would be able to see Jupiter. The Greeks named this planet Zues, and even before that the ancient Babylonians called it 'Marduk' (representing one of their deities).
On the point you made about planets disappearing...what Galileo had actually observed was three major moons (he thought they were stars, at the time) rotating around Jupiter. This was a startling discovery to him, because as he first observed the moons, he had thought that they had a fixed position. As he continued to observe the moons, he correctly concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter, as they would seem to disappear (from his perspective) as they moved around the massive planet.