The Never-Ending Solar Cycle
Even though the solar activity was well known to the early Chinese astronomers, it was not first observed by Galileo until 1612 with his new telescope, a Dutch version. He also discovered the Jupiter moons, the Moon and its craters, along with Venus. But when he saw the Sun, he also saw some dark smudges he could not figure out. Even though Galileo Galilei himself could not figure it out, his enemy Christoph Scheiner stated that it must be little tiny undiscovered planets that were circling the Sun, passing in front of the hot planet. But of course, this theory was eventually proved wrong by Galileo during his most famous years, 1564-1642.
The solar physics would never had been recognized if it had not been for the invention of the 1600 telescope, with Galileo one of the first to use it from 1610 to 1613. The next major solar advancement was in 1817 when Fraunhofer discovered the dark lines in the spectrum of light from the Sun. The information up to this time allowed a scientific method to form which allowed the scientific field to learn the atomic composition of the Sun and the temperatures in its outer layers.
Rapidly advancing after this, the field of solar spectroscopy moved into the late 1900s—focusing on the development of specializing instruments for study of the Sun, showing the existence of the magnetic fields of the Sun within the earlier 1908 development of the Mount Wilson Observatory. This ground study continued until 1946 with rocket observations, with the launching of the Sputnik in 1957. After this, rocket instruments and orbiting satellites began to allow the study and observations of the ultraviolet and x-ray areas of the solar spectrum, pioneering the way for high temperature astrophysics to be applied to the solar atmosphere of temperatures exceeding 1 million degrees.
Timetable for the study of sun cycles:
- ca. 200 BC The distance to the Sun1543 The Sun moves to center stage1609 The Sun in focus1610 First telescopic observations of sunspots
1644 The Sun as a star
1645-1715 The Maunder minimum
1687 The mass of the Sun
1774-1801 The physical nature of sunspots
1817 Solar spectroscopy is born
1843 The sunspot cycle
1852 The sunspot cycle is linked to geomagnetic activity
1859 First observation of a solar flare
1860 First observations of a coronal mass ejection
1908-1919 The magnetic nature of sunspots
This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 4:38 am and is filed under Mission History, Public Relations, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
