Timeline of stellar astronomy
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- 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 - Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer discover the Becklin-Neugebauer object at 10 micrometres