The Movement of the Stars and Planets

Astronomy is the cool, sexy field of the scientific world. Sure, biologists and chemists are out there curing diseases or whatever, but they’re just so boring. Meanwhile, astronomers are busy showing us sweet pictures of distant planets and playing around with telescopes the size of buildings. How can you compete with that? You can’t, so here are the ten most important things astronomers throughout the ages have discovered:

The Movement of the Stars and Planets

The Discovery
It’s tough to wade through a couple thousand years of ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Mayan and Persian astronomical history to pick out the highlights, so I’ going to cheat and roll all of their achievements up into one entry. Maybe if their civilizations hadn’t died out they would have got a better spot on this list, but because they couldn’t keep their empires together the ancient world gets stuck with the number ten spot. That’ll learn ‘em.

How Important Was It?
Many of their accomplishments form the basis of modern astronomy, but it’s the fact that they tracked the movement of the stars and planets that really got the whole ball rolling. The realization that the stars in the sky follow fixed, predicable patterns, along with the discovery of planets that follow their own paths, are the two most basic, fundamental concepts of astronomy. And also astrology, an equally important field of study.

Source : top10

Related Posts