Timeline of solar astronomy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- 900–929 — Muhammad ibn Jābir al-Harrānī al-Battānī (Albatenius) discovers that the direction of the Sun's eccentricity is changing[1]
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
19th century
- 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 a decade
- 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
- 1861 — Gustav Spörer discovers the variation of sun-spot latitudes during a solar cycle, explained by 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