2.4 The birth of modern astronomy  (Page 5/31)

Others had used the telescope before Galileo to observe things on Earth. But in a flash of insight that changed the history of astronomy, Galileo realized that he could turn the power of the telescope toward the heavens. Before using his telescope for astronomical observations, Galileo had to devise a stable mount and improve the optics. He increased the magnification to 30×. Galileo also needed to acquire confidence in the telescope.

At that time, human eyes were believed to be the final arbiter of truth about size, shape, and color. Lenses, mirrors, and prisms were known to distort distant images by enlarging, reducing, or inverting them, or spreading the light into a spectrum (rainbow of colors). Galileo undertook repeated experiments to convince himself that what he saw through the telescope was identical to what he saw up close. Only then could he begin to believe that the miraculous phenomena the telescope revealed in the heavens were real.

Beginning his astronomical work late in 1609, Galileo found that many stars too faint to be seen with the unaided eye became visible with his telescope. In particular, he found that some nebulous blurs resolved into many stars, and that the Milky Way—the strip of whiteness across the night sky—was also made up of a multitude of individual stars.

Examining the planets, Galileo found four moons revolving about Jupiter in times ranging from just under 2 days to about 17 days. This discovery was particularly important because it showed that not everything has to revolve around Earth. Furthermore, it demonstrated that there could be centers of motion that are themselves in motion. Defenders of the geocentric view had argued that if Earth was in motion, then the Moon would be left behind because it could hardly keep up with a rapidly moving planet. Yet, here were Jupiter’s moons doing exactly that. (To recognize this discovery and honor his work, NASA named a spacecraft that explored the Jupiter system Galileo.)

With his telescope, Galileo was able to carry out the test of the Copernican theory mentioned earlier, based on the phases of Venus . Within a few months, he had found that Venus goes through phases like the Moon, showing that it must revolve about the Sun, so that we see different parts of its daylight side at different times (see [link] .) These observations could not be reconciled with Ptolemy’s model, in which Venus circled about Earth. In Ptolemy’s model, Venus could also show phases, but they were the wrong phases in the wrong order from what Galileo observed.

Galileo also observed the Moon and saw craters, mountain ranges, valleys, and flat, dark areas that he thought might be water. These discoveries showed that the Moon might be not so dissimilar to Earth—suggesting that Earth, too, could belong to the realm of celestial bodies.

After Galileo’s work, it became increasingly difficult to deny the Copernican view, and Earth was slowly dethroned from its central position in the universe and given its rightful place as one of the planets attending the Sun. Initially, however, Galileo met with a great deal of opposition. The Roman Catholic Church, still reeling from the Protestant Reformation, was looking to assert its authority and chose to make an example of Galileo. He had to appear before the Inquisition to answer charges that his work was heretical, and he was ultimately condemned to house arrest. His books were on the Church’s forbidden list until 1836, although in countries where the Roman Catholic Church held less sway, they were widely read and discussed. Not until 1992 did the Catholic Church admit publicly that it had erred in the matter of censoring Galileo’s ideas.