Home > Timeline of solar astronomy

• 1613 - Galileo Galilei uses sunspot observations to demonstrate the rotation of the Sun
• 1619 - Johannes Kepler postulates a solar wind to explain the direction of comet tails
• 1802 - William Hyde Wollaston observes dark lines in the solar spectrum
• 1814 - Joseph Fraunhofer systematically studies the dark lines in the solar spectrum
• 1834Events January 1 Abolition of customs charges at borders within Germany. January 3 The government of Mexico imprisons Stephen F. Austin in Mexico City March 6 York, Upper Canada is incorporated as Toronto. March 18 The Tolpuddle Martyrs, six Dorset farm l - Hermann HelmholtzHermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz ( August 31, 1821 September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist. Helmholtz was the son of a gymnasium headmaster, Ferdinand Helmholtz, who had studied classical philology and philosophy, and who was a close proposes gravitational contraction as the energy source for the Sun
• 1843Events February 6 The first minstrel show in the United States The Virginia Minstrels opens (Bowery Amphitheatre in New York City). February 11 Giuseppe Verdi's opera I Lombardi premieres in Milan May 18 The Disruption of the Church of Scotland took place - Heinrich SchwabeSamuel Heinrich Schwabe ( October 25, 1789 April 11, 1875) was a German astronomer. Schwabe was born at Dessau. At first an apothecary, he turned his attention to astronomy, and in 1826 commenced his observations on sunspots. In 1843 he made the suggestio announces his discovery of the sunspot cycle and estimates its period to be about ten years
• 1852Events January 14 President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte proclaims a new constitution for the French Second Republic. January 17 United Kingdom recognizes independence of the Transvaal Devil's Island penal colony opens February 11 First British public toilet - Edward Sabine shows that sunspot number is correlated with geomagnetic field variations
• 1859 - Richard Carrington discovers solar flares
• 1860 - Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen discover that each chemical element has its own distinct set of spectral lines and use this fact to explain the solar dark lines
• 1861 - Gustav Spörer discovers the variation of sun-spot latitudes during a solar cycle, known as Spörer's law
• 1863 - Richard Carrington discovers the differential nature of solar rotation
• 1868 - Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen and Norman Lockyer discover an unidentified yellow line in solar prominence spectra and suggest it comes from a new element which they name " helium"
• 1893 - Edward Maunder discovers the 1645- 1715 Maunder sunspot minimum
• 1904 - Edward Maunder plots the first sunspot "butterfly diagram"
• 1906 - Karl Schwarzschild explains solar limb darkening
• 1908 - George Hale discovers the Zeeman splitting of spectral lines from sunspots
• 1929 - Bernard Lyot invents the coronagraph and observes the corona with an "artificial eclipse."
• 1942 - J.S. Hey detects solar radio waves
• 1949 - Herbert Friedman detects solar X-rays
• 1960 - Robert Leighton, Robert Noyes , and George Simon discover solar five-minute oscillations by observing the Doppler shifts of solar dark lines
• 1961 - Horace W. Babcock proposes the magnetic coiling sunspot theory
• 1970 - Roger Ulrich , John Leibacher , and Robert Stein deduce from theoretical solar models that the interior of the Sun could act as a resonant acoustic cavity
• 1975 - Franz-Ludwig Deubner makes the first accurate measurements of the period and horizontal wavelength of the five-minute solar oscillations