Notable Astronomers

Eratosthenes

Measured Earth's circumference.

Aristarchus

Proposed early heliocentric model.

Ptolemy

Created geocentric model with epicycles.

Copernicus

Revived heliocentric model.

Tycho Brahe

Made precise naked-eye observations.

Johannes Kepler

Formulated laws of planetary motion.

Galileo Galilei

Telescope observations supporting heliocentrism.

Isaac Newton

Laws of motion and universal gravitation.

Albert Einstein

Developed general relativity.

James Clerk Maxwell

Theorized light as electromagnetic wave.

Joseph von Fraunhofer

Discovered solar absorption lines.

Gustav Kirchhoff

Formulated laws of spectroscopy.

Wilhelm Wien

Developed Wien’s Law.

Stefan & Boltzmann

Formulated Stefan–Boltzmann Law.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Discovered pulsars with radio telescopes.

Laplace

Proposed early nebular theory.

Gerard Kuiper

Proposed the Kuiper Belt.

Jan Oort

Proposed the Oort Cloud.

Giuseppe Piazzi

Discovered Ceres.

Clyde Tombaugh

Discovered Pluto.

James Hutton & Charles Lyell

Founded modern geology principles.

Hans Bethe

Described nuclear fusion in the Sun.

Annie Jump Cannon

Created modern stellar classification.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Discovered Cepheid variable relation.

Hertzsprung & Russell

Developed the H-R Diagram.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Discovered white dwarf mass limit.

William Herschel

Mapped stars and Milky Way structure.

Vera Rubin

Discovered evidence for dark matter.

Edwin Hubble

Discovered universe's expansion.

Georges Lemaître

Proposed the Big Bang theory.

Arno Penzias & Robert Wilson

Discovered cosmic microwave background.

Alan Guth

Proposed inflationary universe.

Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess

Discovered accelerating universe.

Fritz Zwicky

Proposed dark matter in galaxy clusters.