A History of Astrophysics, Part 5
From the desk of Fjordman on Wed, 2010-07-14 19:11Even after the introduction of the telescope it took centuries for Western astronomers to work out the true scale of the universe. The English astronomer and architect Thomas Wright (1711-1786) suggested around 1750 that the Milky Way was a disk-like system of stars and that there were other star systems similar to it, only very far away from us. Soon after, Immanuel Kant in 1755 hypothesized that the Solar System is part of a huge, lens-shaped collection of stars and that similar such “island universes” exist elsewhere, too. Kant’s thoughts about the universe, however, were philosophical and had little observational content.
Thursday, 15 July 2010
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