Giants of Early Astronomy Astronomy: Introduction

Astronomy Astronomy is the study of the universe We live on a planet that orbits a sun The Sun is just part of a galaxy And there are billions of galaxies in the universe

Ancient Greeks Ancient Greeks Between 600 BC and AD 150, the Greeks had developed geometry and trigonometry Aristotle concluded the Earth is round Hipparchus created a star catalog And Eratosthenes figured out the circumference of the Earth

Heliocentric Model The Greeks did make a mistake…they thought the planets orbited the Earth …the Geocentric Model But anther Greek figured out the planets rotated around the sun or Heliocentric Model

Copernicus Copernicus concluded that the Earth was just another planet And that Earth, and all the other planets, orbited the Sun

Tycho Brahe By the late 1500s, Brahe makes the most precise observations of the planets of the times The telescope had not been invented but Brahe created some other cool tools for observing the planets Plus he had a cool name!

Kepler Kepler worked with Brahe and extended Brahe’s work Kepler discovered three laws of planetary motion – including the ellipse or oval orbit

Galileo Galilei Around the 1600s Considered one of the greatest Italian scientist of the Renaissance He Constructed his own telescope and made amazing discoveries viewing our solar system

Isaac Newton Late 1600s and Newton comes up with the law of universal gravitation Newton said that all bodies in space attract every other body with a force dependent on their mass And he came up with Calculus…and you thought Algebra was hard