The timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites charts the progress of the discovery of new bodies over history. Each object is listed in chronological order of its discovery (multiple dates occur when the moments of imaging, observation, and publication differ), identified through its various designations
In 1610 when Galileo first turned a telescope on the heavens and our knowledge of the universe exploded. By the end of the 17th century, 9 new bodies had been discovered and Copernicus''s heliocentric theory was widely accepted. The total number of known bodies had more than doubled to 17:
Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth ''s "cosmic neighborhood". [1] This includes the Sun, Earth and the Moon, the major planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, their satellites, as well as smaller bodies including comets
From the dawn of history until the beginning of the 17th century the known universe consisted of only 8 bodies:
plus the “fixed” stars. These are the ones that canbe seen easilywithout any optical instruments. In Europe, the prevailing view was thePtolemaicsystem with the Earth at the center and the other bodies revolving around it.
In 1610 whenGalileofirst turned a telescope on the heavens and our knowledge of the universe exploded. By the end of the 17th century, 9 new bodies had been discovered andCopernicus’s heliocentric theory was widely accepted. The total number of known bodies had more than doubled to 17:
Only 5 new bodies (not countingcomets) were discovered in the 18th century (all by WilliamHerschel) bringing the total to 22:
The number of bodies in the solar system increased dramatically in the 19th century with the discovery of theasteroids(464 of which were known at by 1899) but only 9 more “major” bodies were discovered. The number of major bodies rose to 31 (almost double the 17th century total):
27 more small moons were discovered by the twoVoyagerspacecraft:
Dozens more small moons have been discovered in recent years with large ground basedtelescopesand CCD cameras. There are well over 100 now known; SeeJPL’s sitefor more details.
Humans (Homo sapiens) have inhabited the Earth in the last 300,000 years at least,[1] and they had witnessed directly observable astronomical and geological phenomena. For millennia, these have arose admiration and curiosity, being admitted as of superhuman nature and scale. Multiple imaginative interpretations were being fixed in oral traditions of difficult dating, and incorporated into a variety of belief systems, as animism, shamanism, mythology, religion and/or philosophy.
Although such phenomena are not "discoveries" per se, as they are part of the common human experience, their observation shape the knowledge and comprehension of the world around us, and about its position in the observable universe, in which the Sun plays a role of outmost importance for us. What today is known to be the Solar System was regarded for generations as the contents of the "whole universe".
Along with an indeterminate number of unregistered sightings of rare events: meteor impacts; novae and supernovae.
The number of currently known, or observed, objects of the Solar System are in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them are listed in the following articles:
Solar System → Local Interstellar Cloud → Local Bubble → Gould Belt → Orion Arm → Milky Way → Milky Way subgroup → Local Group → Local Sheet → Virgo Supercluster → Laniakea Supercluster → Local Hole → Observable universe → UniverseEach arrow (→) may be read as "within" or "part of".
Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth''s "cosmic neighborhood".[1] This includes the Sun, Earth and the Moon, the major planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, their satellites, as well as smaller bodies including comets, asteroids, and dust.[1]
For millennia, what today is known to be the Solar System was regarded as the "whole universe", so the knowledge of both mostly advanced in parallel. A clear distinction was not made until around the mid-17th century. Since then, incremental knowledge has been gained not only about the Solar System, but also about outer space and its deep-sky objects.
The composition of stars and planets was investigated with spectroscopy. Observations of Solar System bodies with other types of electromagnetic radiation became possible with radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, ultraviolet astronomy, X-ray astronomy, and gamma-ray astronomy.
Robotic space probes, the Apollo program landings of humans on the Moon, and space telescopes have vastly increased human knowledge about the atmosphere, geology, and electromagnetic properties of other planets, giving rise to the new field of planetary science.
The Solar System is one of many planetary systems in the galaxy.[1][2] The planetary system that contains Earth is named the "Solar" System. The word "solar" is derived from the Latin word for Sun, Sol (genitive Solis). Anything related to the Sun is called "solar": for example, stellar wind from the Sun is called solar wind.
The first humans had limited understanding of the celestial bodies that could be seen in the sky. The Sun, however, was of immediate interest, as it generates the day-night cycle. Even more, the dawn and sunset always take part at roughly the same points of the horizon, which helped to develop the cardinal directions. The Moon was another body of immediate interest, because of its higher visual size. The Lunar phases allowed to measure time in longer periods than those of days, and predict the duration of seasons.[3]
Prehistoric beliefs about the structure and origin of the universe were highly diverse, often rooted in religious cosmology, and many are unrecorded. Many associated the classical planets (these star-like points visible with the naked eye) with deities, in part due to their puzzling forward and retrograde motion against the otherwise fixed stars, which gave them their nickname of "wanderer stars", πλάνητες ἀστέρες (planētes asteres) in Ancient Greek, from which today''s word "planet" was derived.[4]
One important discovery made at different times in different places is that the bright planet sometimes seen near the sunrise (called Phosphorus by the Greeks) and the bright planet sometimes seen near the sunset (called Hesperus by the Greeks) were actually the same planet, Venus.[7]
A later geocentric model developed by Ptolemy attached smaller spheres to a smaller number of large spheres to explain the complex motions of the planets, a device known as deferent and epicycle first developed by Apollonius of Perga. Published in the Almagest, this model of celestial spheres surrounding a spherical Earth was reasonably accurate and predictive,[9] and became dominant among educated people in various cultures, spreading from Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome, Christian Europe, the Islamic world, South Asia, and China via inheritance and copying of texts, conquest, trade, and missionaries. It remained in widespread use until the 16th century.[9]
It took some time for the new theories to diffuse across the world. For example, with the Age of Discovery already well underway, astronomical thought in America was based on the older Greek theories,[11] but newer western European ideas began to appear in writings by 1659.[12]
The invention of the telescope revolutionized astronomy, making it possible to see details about the Sun, Moon, and planets not available to the naked eye. It appeared around 1608 in the Netherlands, and was quickly adopted among European enthusiasts and astronomers to study the skies.
Italian polymath Galileo Galilei was an early user and made prolific discoveries, including the phases of Venus, which definitively disproved the arrangement of spheres in the Ptolemaic system.Galileo also discovered that the Moon was cratered, that the Sun was marked with sunspots, and that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it.[13] Christiaan Huygens followed on from Galileo''s discoveries by discovering Saturn''s moon Titan and the shape of the rings of Saturn.[14] Giovanni Domenico Cassini later discovered four more moons of Saturn and the Cassini division in Saturn''s rings.[15]
About Solar system discoveries timeline
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