Galileo Galalilei Research Paper

Anders Christensen

Mr. Givich

World History 9

April 22nd, 2016

Galileo and His Discoveries

“Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not”(Galileo). Nature is a strange place. No man nor woman will ever understand the full concept and meaning of nature. It is so complex that humans have divided it into subjects to understand it. Many who try to grasp the entirety will fail. Though some have been close and have often developed new ideas and theories that have completely revolutionized the way we look at it. One such person was Galileo Galilei, an astronomer and mathematician from Italy. Galileo originally studied medicine at university, but was more

The telescope was originally born in the Netherlands in the year 1609 and Galileo went to see it. After he came back, “By trial and error, he quickly figured out the secret of the invention and made his own three-powered spyglass from lenses for sale in spectacle makers’ shops,” (Britannica). As said, Galileo’s inventions proved to be successful for science and helped expand its capabilities. The brilliance of Galileo’s telescope was that the magnification was 20x, compared to 3x for the one in Holland ("Who Invented the Telescope?"). This was a huge accomplishment for Galileo, and for science, since people could now look much further into the universe and dig into the secrets that were inaccessible to look at before. This invention proved to be the access point of many new discoveries of space. The revolution enabled new ideas about the Milky Way, as much as it allowed study on ground objects. “Galileo decided to demonstrate the great number of stars that actually existed by depicting a few star systems that were known to all and including the additional stars that he had observed. He chose to depict the entire constellations of Orion and the Pleiades,”(Sandi Hassinger, The Question Of Nebulae). He was able to draw star formations by looking at them through his telescope with the newly found stars, which shows that the telescope provided accurate observations of space. With this invention Galileo was able to uncover

He discovered vast planets which are still known today. The next year he distributed his first results, where he portrayed the highlands and "oceans" of the Moon, four of Jupiter's biggest moons, and numerous newfound stars ("Galileo Galilei."). He likewise found the phases of Venus’ course and sunspots on the sun, consequently affirming that the Sun pivots on point in the center, and that the planets circle around the Sun, instead of Earth in the center of the universe. Galileo felt that most planetary circles are round, when they are actually elliptical, as appeared by Johannes Kepler (ibid.). Still, Galileo's perceptions have affirmed Copernicus' model of a heliocentric Solar System, (ibid). The four moons he discovered were Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io, which are the biggest moons of Jupiter. The moons were discovered in 1609-1610 by the telescope that he had previously built. This was a significant discovery, since it was the first time a planetary body had been found orbiting a planet. The moons are the largest celestial bodies in our solar system excluding the sun and the 8 planets, and the largest, Ganymede, is larger than mercury, the closest planet to the sun, (Wikipedia). This was, without a doubt, a very successful discovery for Galileo, and it granted him a double salary from before. He originally thought the moons were stationary, fixed around Jupiter, but that was before he found the fourth