Timeline of stellar astronomy

Timeline of stellar astronomy134 BC - Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent luminosities1596 - David Fabricius notices that Mira's brightness varies1672 - Geminiano Montanari notices that Algol's brightness varies1686 - Gottfried Kirch notices that Chi Cygni's brightness varies1718 - Edmund Halley discovers stellar proper motions by comparing his astrometric measurements with those of the Greeks1782 - John Goodricke notices that the brightness variations of Algol are periodic and proposes that it is partially eclipsed by a body moving around it1784 - Edward Piggot discovers the first Cepheid variable star1838 - Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Struve, and Friedrich Bessel measure stellar parallaxes1844 - Friedrich Bessel explains the wobbling motions of Sirius and Procyon by suggesting that these stars have dark companions1906 - Arthur Eddington begins his statistical study of stellar motions1908 - Henrietta Leavitt discovers the Cepheid period-luminosity relation1910 - Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell study the relation between magnitudes and spectral types of stars1924 - Arthur Eddington develops the main sequence mass-luminosity relationship1929 - George Gamow proposes hydrogen fusion as the energy source for stars1938 - Hans Bethe and Carl von Weizsacker detail the proton-proton chain and CNO cycle in stars1939 - Rupert Wildt realizes the importance of the negative hydrogen ion for stellar opacity1952 - Walter Baade distinguishes between Cepheid I and Cepheid II variable stars1953 - Fred Hoyle predicts a carbon-12 resonance to allow stellar triple alpha reactions at reasonable stellar interior temperatures1961 - Chushiro Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of fully convective stars1963 - Fred Hoyle and William A. Fowler conceive the idea of supermassive stars1964 - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman develop a general relativistic theory of stellar pulsations and show that supermassive stars are subject to a general relativistic instability1967 - Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer discover the Becklin-Neugebauer object at 10 micrometres
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