- 134 BC – Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent
luminosities - 1596 – David Fabricius notices that Mira’s brightness varies
- 1672 – Geminiano Montanari notices that Algol’s brightness varies
- 1686 – Gottfried Kirch notices that Chi Cygni’s brightness varies
- 1718 – Edmund Halley discovers stellar proper motions by comparing his
astrometric measurements with those of the Greeks - 1782 – John Goodricke notices that the brightness variations of Algol
are periodic and proposes that it is partially eclipsed by a body
moving around it - 1784 – Edward Piggot discovers the first Cepheid variable star
- 1838 – Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Struve, and Friedrich Bessel measure
stellar parallaxes - 1844 – Friedrich Bessel explains the wobbling motions of Sirius and
Procyon by suggesting that these stars have dark companions - 1906 – Arthur Eddington begins his statistical study of stellar motions
- 1908 – Henrietta Leavitt discovers the Cepheid period-luminosity
relation - 1910 – Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Russell study the relation between
magnitudes and spectral types of stars - 1924 – Arthur Eddington develops the main sequence mass-luminosity
relationship - 1929 – George Gamow proposes hydrogen fusion as the energy source for
stars - 1938 – Hans Bethe and Carl von Weizsacker detail the proton-proton
chain and CNO cycle in stars - 1939 – Rupert Wildt realizes the importance of the negative hydrogen
ion for stellar opacity - 1952 – Walter Baade distinguishes between Cepheid I and Cepheid II
variable stars - 1953 – Fred Hoyle predicts a carbon-12 resonance to allow stellar
triple alpha reactions at reasonable stellar interior temperatures - 1961 – Chushiro Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of
fully convective stars - 1963 – Fred Hoyle and William Fowler conceive the idea of supermassive
stars - 1964 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman develop a general
relativistic theory of stellar pulsations and show that supermassive
stars are subject to a general relativistic instability - 1967 – Gerry Neugebauer and Eric Becklin discover the
Becklin-Neugebauer object at 10 microns
Timeline of Stellar Astronomy
