Major Astronomer Timeline

Hipparchus

190BC- 120BC Greek astronomer

Hipparchus of Nicaea was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry but is most famous for his incidental discovery of precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, and probably died on the island of Rhodes, Greece.

Hipparchus

Copernicus

Polymath 1473-1543

Nicolaus Copernicus was one of the great astronomers of the 16th century. He was born on 19 February 1473 in the Polish town of Torun. (His real name was Mikolaj Kopernik although he is better known by his Latin name). His father was a rich merchant and Nicolaus was one of 4 children.

Copernicus

Brahe

Astronomer 1546-1601

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman, astronomer, and writer known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical observations. He was born in the then Danish peninsula of Scania. Tycho was well known in his lifetime as an astronomer, astrologer, and alchemist.

Brahe

Galileo

Astronomer, Physicist, Engineer 1564-1642

Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564 near Pisa, the son of a musician. He began to study medicine at the University of Pisa but changed to philosophy and mathematics. In 1589, he became professor of mathematics at Pisa.

Galileo

Kepler

Astronomer 1571-1630

Johannes Kepler was one of the great astronomers of the 17th century. Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt in southern Germany on 27 December 1571. His father Heinrich was a mercenary soldier. At first, Johannes planned to become a theologian but while at university he became interested in astronomy.

Kepler

Isaac Newton

Mathematician, Physicist, Astronomer 1643-1727

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. The son of a farmer who died three months before he was born, Newton spent most of his early years with his maternal grandmother after his mother remarried. His education was interrupted by a failed attempt to turn him into a farmer, and he attended the King’s School in Grantham before enrolling at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1661.

Newton studied a classical curriculum at Cambridge, but he became fascinated by the works of modern philosophers such as René Descartes, even devoting a set of notes to his outside readings he titled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae” (“Certain Philosophical Questions”). When the Great Plague shuttered Cambridge in 1665, Newton returned home and began formulating his theories on calculus, light and color, his farm the setting for the supposed falling apple that inspired his work on gravity.

I

Newton

Messier

French Astronomer 1730-1817

Charles Messier was the tenth of twelve children born to a wealthy French family on June 26, 1730. The loss of his father at the age of eleven changed the family's financial status, however, and Messier left formal education to be schooled at home by his older brother.

At the age of 21, Messier took a position with the Astronomer to the French Navy, where he kept careful records of the observations of the heavens. Messier went on to serve as the chief astronomer of the Marine Observatory in 1759 and later became the Astronomer of the Navy himself in 1771. He became a member of the prestigious Royal Society of London in 1764.

Messier

Einstein

Theoretical Physicist 1879-1955

Albert Einstein, (born March 14, 1879, Ulm, Württemberg, Germany—died April 18, 1955, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.), German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

Einstein

Edwin Hubble

American Astronomer 1889-1953

Edwin Hubble was born on November 20, 1889. He graduated from the University of Chicago and served in WWI before settling down to lead research in the field of astrophysics at Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Hubble's revolutionary work includes finding a constant relationship between galaxies' redshift and distance, which helped to eventually prove that the universe is expanding. Additionally, a classification system that he created for galaxies has been used by other researchers for decades, now known as the Hubble sequence.

Hubble

Stephen Hawking

Theoretical Physicist 1942-2018

British cosmologist Stephen William Hawking was born in England on Jan. 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day after the death of the astronomer Galileo Galilei. He attended University College, Oxford, where he studied physics, despite his father's urging to focus on medicine. Hawking went on to Cambridge to research cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole.

In early 1963, just shy of his 21st birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He was not expected to live more than two years. Completing his doctorate did not appear likely. Yet, Hawking defied the odds, not only attaining his Ph.D. but also forging new roads into the understanding of the universe in the decades since.

Hawking