Timeline of solar astronomy

Revision as of 22:24, 4 April 2006; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→

17th Century

1613 - Galileo Galilei uses sunspot observations to demonstrate the rotation of the Sun
1619 - Johannes Kepler postulates a solar wind to explain the direction of comet tails

1802 - William Hyde Wollaston observes dark lines in the solar spectrum
1814 - Joseph Fraunhofer systematically studies the dark lines in the solar spectrum
1834 - Hermann Helmholtz proposes gravitational contraction as the energy source for the Sun
1843 - Heinrich Schwabe announces his discovery of the sunspot cycle and estimates its period to be about ten years
1852 - Edward Sabine shows that sunspot number is correlated with geomagnetic field variations
1859 - Richard Carrington discovers solar flares
1860 - Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen discover that each chemical element has its own distinct set of spectral lines and use this fact to explain the solar dark lines
1861 - Gustav Spörer discovers the variation of sun-spot latitudes during a solar cycle, known as Spörer's law
1863 - Richard Carrington discovers the differential nature of solar rotation
1868 - Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer discover an unidentified yellow line in solar prominence spectra and suggest it comes from a new element which they name "helium"
1893 - Edward Maunder discovers the 1645-1715 Maunder sunspot minimum

1904 - Edward Maunder plots the first sunspot "butterfly diagram"
1906 - Karl Schwarzschild explains solar limb darkening
1908 - George Hale discovers the Zeeman splitting of spectral lines from sunspots
1929 - Bernard Lyot invents the coronagraph and observes the corona with an "artificial eclipse."
1942 - J.S. Hey detects solar radio waves
1949 - Herbert Friedman detects solar X-rays
1960 - Robert Leighton, Robert Noyes, and George Simon discover solar five-minute oscillations by observing the Doppler shifts of solar dark lines
1961 - Horace W. Babcock proposes the magnetic coiling sunspot theory
1970 - Roger Ulrich, John Leibacher, and Robert Stein deduce from theoretical solar models that the interior of the Sun could act as a resonant acoustic cavity
1975 - Franz-Ludwig Deubner makes the first accurate measurements of the period and horizontal wavelength of the five-minute solar oscillations
1981 - NASA retrieves data from 1978 showing a comet crashing into the sun