![]() He also used the telescope to inspect other cloudy patches in the sky called nebulae (from the Latin nebula, meaning “cloud”). The technical term for Galileo's observation is that he “resolved” the Milky Way-saw that it was not inherently cloudy, but was rather a collection of smaller objects. His new instrument revealed that the Milky Way was, he said, “in fact nothing but a congeries of innumerable stars grouped together in clusters.” The first step to understanding our galaxy came in 1610 when the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) improved the design of the recently invented telescope and turned it toward the night sky. Historical Background and Scientific Foundations The study of our galaxy has always been complicated by the fact that we are inside it, and the story of galactic astronomy is largely the story of how astronomers solved the problem of what we would look like from afar. The details of the Milky Way's size and shape, and even the existence of other galaxies like it, were determined only in the mid-twentieth century. It was not perfect, like the stars, nor did it move like the planets, making it unimportant to most early astronomers. Historical Background and Scientific FoundationsĮarly Western astronomy, beginning with the Greeks, paid surprisingly little attention to the Milky Way Aristotle (384–322 BC), in fact, dismissed it as an atmospheric effect. It is a striking phenomenon and appears in many premodern mythologies. The most obvious indication of this structure is the Milky Way (also called the galaxy, from the Greek for “milk”): a broad band of stars and cloudy illumination that stretches across the sky. The fundamental goal of galactic astronomy is to determine the scale and structure of the group of stars around Earth. Astronomy and Space Science: Galactic Astronomy Introduction
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