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Timeline of stellar astronomy
2300 BC — First great period of star naming in China.[1]
134 BC — Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent luminosities
185 AD — Chinese astronomers become the first to observe a supernova , the SN 185
964 — Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) writes the Book of Fixed Stars Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud , and lists numerous stars with their positions, magnitudes, brightness, and colour, and gives drawings for each constellation
1000s (decade) — The Persian astronomer , Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī , describes the Milky Way galaxy as a collection of numerous nebulous stars
1006 — Ali ibn Ridwan and Chinese astronomers observe the SN 1006 , the brightest stellar event ever recorded
1054 — Chinese and Arab astronomers observe the SN 1054 , responsible for the creation of the Crab Nebula , the only nebula whose creation was observed
1181 — Chinese astronomers observe the SN 1181 supernova
1580 — Taqi al-Din measures the right ascension of the stars at the Constantinople Observatory of Taqi ad-Din using an "observational clock" he invented and which he described as "a mechanical clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the seconds"
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 Pigott 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 Norris 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 Weizsäcker 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 — Chūshirō Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of fully convective stars
1963 — Fred Hoyle and William A. 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 — Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer discover the Becklin-Neugebauer Object at 10 micrometres
1977 — (May 25) The Star Wars
2012 — (May 2) First visual proof of existence of black-holes. Suvi Gezari 's team in Johns Hopkins University , using the Hawaiian telescope Pan-STARRS 1 , publish images of a supermassive black hole 2.7 million light-years away swallowing a red giant .[2] See also References
