from French galaxie or directly from Late Latin galaxias "the Milky Way" as a feature in the night sky (in classical Latin via lactea or circulus lacteus)from Greek galaxias (adj.), in galaxias kyklos, literally "milky circle," from gala (genitive galaktos) "milk" (see lactation). The technical astronomical sense in reference to the discrete stellar aggregate including the sun and all visible stars emerged by 1848. Figurative sense of "brilliant assembly of persons" is from
"the whole world, cosmos, the totality of existing things," from Old French univers (12c.), from Latin universum "all things, everybody, all people, the whole world," noun use of neuter of adjective universus "all together, all in one, whole, entire, relating to all," literally "turned into one," from unus"one" (see one) + versus, past participle of vertere "to turn" (see versus).
Giordana Bruno proposed that stars were other objects like our Sun, just much further away. Astronomers then started measuring changes in the luminosity of stars, and even the proper motion of nearby stars; they had changed their position since they were first measured by the ancient Greek astronomers Ptolemy and Hipparchus. The first measurement of distance to star was made by Friedrich Bessell in 1838 using the parallax technique – 61 Cygnus was measured to be 11.4 light years away(link).
astronomer Pierre Gassendi first observed Mercury making a transit across the sun, and just a couple of years later, another astronomer, Giovanni Zupi discovered phases, indicating that the planet orbited the sun. Other astronomers followed, making incremental discoveries along the way: Italian Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed the planet, and concluded that Mercury was tidally locked with the sun.
from Italian telescopio (Galileo, 1611), and Modern Latin telescopium (Kepler, 1613), both from Greek teleskopos "far-seeing," from tele- "far" (seetele-) + -skopos "watcher" (see scope (n.1)). Said to have been coined by Prince Cesi, founder and head of the Roman Academy of the Lincei (Galileo was a member). Used in English in Latin form from 1619.
“Carrington had noticed the spread of a particular term related to scientific research. He himself felt the word was “not satisfactory,” and he wrote to eight prominent writers and men of science to ask if they considered it legitimate. Today “scientist” is not only an accepted title—it is a coveted one. To be a “scientist” is to be someone with an acknowledged right to make knowledge claims about the natural world. However, as the 1894 debate suggests, the term has a fraught history among English-speaking scientific practitioners. In retrospect, Huxley and Argyll’s rejection of “scientist” might seem merely quaint, even petty. But the history of the word “scientist” is not just a linguistic curiosity. Debates over its acceptance or rejection were, in the end, not about the word itself: they were about what science was, and what place its practitioners held in their society.”
a vehicle designed for travel or operation in space beyond the earth's atmosphere or in orbit around the earth.
NASA has accomplished many great scientific and technological feats in air and space. NASA technology also has been adapted for many nonaerospace uses by the private sector. NASA remains a leading force in scientific research and in stimulating public interest in aerospace exploration, as well as science and technology in general
artificial illumination of the sky that sets a limit on the faintness of stars that can be observed or photographed.
“The intense heat of the young Sun drove away most of the lighter hydrogen and helium elements — 99% of the leftovers — the furthest. These eventually condensed to form the gassy outer giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The tiny bit of heavier elements that remained made up the rockier Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.Through a combination of gentle collisions and gravity these atoms and molecules began attracting other like-sized material. Over millions of years, they gradually shaped themselves into solid planetesimals, and later protoplanets with their own unique orbits.Astronomers call all this smashing and joining together accretion. After 10 to 100 million years of this banging, eight spherical, stable planets remained. Our Solar System spun into place.
Explosions close enough to wreak such havoc are pretty rare, but Melott thinks at least one of the major extinction events in the last 500 million years was probably caused by a supernova.
Been admired throughout human history. “The Sun is personified in many mythologies: the Greeks called it Helios and the Romans called it Sol. (Link)” “ It was five billion years ago. A giant cloud of matter in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, condensed under its gravity, exploding in nuclear fusion.This fusion released what we call sunshine. Very, very, very hot sunshine. And the newly formed star was our Sun. It drew in most of the surrounding matter, but some escaped. And some of this material clumped together, settling into a protoplanetary orbit.
“According to current astronomical models, the Milky Way and other large galaxies formed over billions of years in a process that involved interactions between smaller galaxies, and in particular the gradual capture of many stars from nearby dwarf galaxies (small galaxies with hundreds or thousands of times fewer stars than the Milky Way)
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