This blog is dedicated to the clever and creative ways that famous astronomers [may] have used their discoveries and life stories to charm potential mates.
Posts signed “JC” are by Jennifer, and posts signed “AZ” are by Alexandra. Astronomers’ birth/death dates were found on Wikipedia.
-Jennifer and Alexandra
Because Galileo probably had quite a repertoire of pick-up lines, here’s one from later in his life. His work showed that a heliocentric model of the universe made much more sense than the geocentric model. This threatened the Church, because verses from the Bible had been interpreted to mean that the Earth was a fixed point and only other objects moved around it. The idea that humans were not at the center of the universe also made people question the concept of a deity that considered humanity “special.” -JC
While Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) did not invent the telescope, he built one that allowed him to discover, among many other things, that there were craters on the moon and spots on the sun. This was significant because it went against the idea of a “perfect universe” and showed that we knew relatively little—even about the celestial objects most visible to us on Earth. -JC
This is the only pick-up line the Doctor needs. -JC
Ptolemy (c. 90 CE-c. 168 CE) developed a geocentric model of the universe which attempted to account for retrograde motion. His model accounted for this apparent backwards movement of the planets by adding “epicycles” within each planet’s orbit (small orbits along a larger one around the earth). His model was considered correct until around 1400 CE. -JC
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was a Danish astronomer who later in his life employed Johannes Kepler as an assistant to his astronomical work. Tycho lost his nose in a duel, which he replaced with a gold prosthetic. He refuted the idea of celestial spheres, by showing that the universe was not perfect and immovable as previously thought. When Tycho died, Kepler later used his empirical data to help continue his work.-AZ
Stephen Hawkings (1942-present) theorized in the mid seventies the existence of a type of radiation that could escape a black hole. Hawking Radiation is a type of thermal radiation that is related to black body radiation emitted by black holes, related to quantum properties of black holes. Hawking’s Radiation allows black holes to eventually lose mass and dissipate.-AZ
In optical telescopes, light is gathered and focused to create powerful images of faraway objects like astronomical objects. The strength of these telescopes is related to the diameter of the objective. The larger the objective, the more light the telescope can collect light, and the finer detail it can resolve.
Optical telescopes run into the problem of becoming too large to be able to support their own weight, or be convenient enough to use, so length is not what matters on a telescope, the resolution of the telescope becomes important.
-AZ
Johannes Kepler was an astronomer that lived from 1571 to 1630. He theorized the laws of planetary motion and tried to understand the underlying physics of the universe, believing that the universe had a perfect order in a treatise, Mysterium Cosmographicum. Kepler believed that the Judeo-Christian god was a creator of a perfect universe, and created the universe in a perfect geometrical arrangement.
Sadly, he was mistaken.
Later in his life he believed that god perhaps arranged the universe in a musical arrangement.
He was mistaken about this as well.
-AZ
Carl Sagan actually said this. It would work on me. -AZ
While red supergiants and blue supergiants are very luminous, their existence in that phase is relatively brief (10 to 100 million years). Stars that are smaller, cooler, and less luminous, found on the lower end of the main sequence (like our sun) can remain stable for up to 20 billion years. Neil DeGrasse Tyson did not discover this, but we used his picture because he is the coolest of all astronomers.-JC
Wilhelm Wien (1864 –1928) is best known for his discovery that the peak wavelength of light emitted by a heated dark object follows a pattern. The light emitted by objects heated to different temperatures will peak at different wavelengths in the spectrum, producing different colors. Cooler objects are red, and as they get hotter they turn orange, yellow, green, etc. Therefore, we can tell the temperature of an object (a star, for instance) by the peak wavelength and its color. If an object is heated beyond the spectrum of visible light, it begins emitting UV waves, which are invisible. “So hot I can’t see you” is very hot, indeed. -JC
While Copernicus is sometimes credited with the introduction of the heliocentric model of the solar system, it was actually the Greek astronomer Aristarchus (310 BCE-230 BCE) who was the first to develop a heliocentric model. However, his ideas were ignored at the time, and it was not until Copernicus’ theory was published in 1453 that people began to seriously question the geocentric model. Later work by Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler showed that Aristarchus’ and Copernicus’ heliocentric model was correct. -JC
Jocelyn Bell Burnell first discovered pulsars in 1976 with her research adviser Antony Hewish. Pulsars are highly magnetized neutron stars that emits interval pulses of electromagnetic radiation. These pulsars can be measured by their radio wave emissions or other pulsitile wavelengths. -AZ
Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) was an American astronomer best known for devising a system for classifying stars based on their temperatures. She created 7 categories: O,B,A,F,G,K, and M. O stars are the hottest (at between 30,000 and 52,000 degrees Kelvin), and are quite rare, while M stars are common and much cooler (at less than 4,000 degrees Kelvin). -JC
