How and when did the ancients figure out that the planets and stars are large objects and not dots in the sky?
In: Physics
The Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, and other ancient cultures mapped the night sky in detail and discovered that Mars, Jupiter, and Venus had unique paths through the sky compared to the Stars. They new they were something special and called them planets but likely didn’t understand the nature of their relationship to Earth.
They believed that the Sun, the Moon, and these planets were all related and in orbited around the Earth.
Galileo Galilei is generally thought to be the first person to make detailed observations of the planets with a telescope.
Edwin Hubble was the first to discover that many observed nebula were actually galaxies.
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