Timeline of solar astronomy

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Timeline of solar astronomy

10th century

• 900–929 —
  Muhammad ibn Jābir al-Harrānī al-Battānī (Albatenius) discovers that the direction of the Sun's eccentricity is changing^[1]

• 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

19th century

• 1802 — William Hyde Wollaston observes dark lines in the solar spectrum
• 1814 — Joseph Fraunhofer systematically studies the dark lines in the solar spectrum
• 1834 —
  gravitational
  contraction as the energy source for the Sun
• 1843 — Heinrich Schwabe announces his discovery of the sunspot cycle and estimates its period to be about a decade
• 1852 —
  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
• 1861 — Gustav Spörer discovers the variation of sun-spot latitudes during a solar cycle, explained by Spörer's law
• 1863 — Richard Carrington discovers the differential nature of solar rotation
• 1868 — Pierre 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 —
  Maunder sunspot minimum

20th century

• 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
• 1925 —
  hydrogen is the dominant element of the Sun
  , not iron
• 1929 —
  corona with an "artificial eclipse
  "
• 1942 —
  J.S. Hey detects solar radio waves
• 1949 — Herbert Friedman detects solar X-rays
• 1960 —
  Doppler shifts
  of solar dark lines
• 1961 —
  magnetic coiling sunspot theory
• 1970 —
  John Leibacher, and Robert F. 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
• 1981 — NASA retrieves data from 1978 that shows a comet crashing into the Sun

21st century

• 2004 — largest solar flare ever recorded occurs

References