"It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon." "You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself." "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." "I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him." Related: 'Galileo Project' will search for evidence of extraterrestrial life from the technology it leaves behind Galileo Quotes Today, Galileo is finally recognized for his groundbreaking discoveries, for which he is remembered as the "father of modern science". He was found guilty of heresy, and was placed under house arrest for the remaining nine years of his life. But in 1632, believing that he could write on the subject if he treated it as a mathematical proposition, he published work on the Copernican system. In 1616, he was summoned to Rome and warned not to teach or write about this controversial theory. His research - including his observations of the phases of Venus and the fact that Jupiter boasted moons that didn't orbit Earth - supported the Copernican system, which (correctly) stated that the Earth and other planets circle the sun.Ī 19th century engraving of Galileo at the Inquisition (Image credit: traveler1116 via Getty) Supported by the Catholic Church, teaching opposite of this system was declared heresy in 1615. In Galileo's lifetime, all celestial bodies were thought to orbit the Earth. "Computer simulations show the precision of his observations revealing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star almost exactly where Galileo observed it." Copernican System "It has been known for several decades that this unknown star was actually the planet Neptune," University of Melbourne physicist David Jamieson told. While observing Jupiter's moons in 16, he recorded a nearby star whose position is not found in any modern catalogues. Galileo may also have made the first recorded studies of the planet Neptune, though he didn't recognize it as a planet. Illustration of Galileo demonstrating his telescope (Image credit: via Getty) These observations also established that there are not only three, but four, erratic sidereal bodies performing their revolutions around Jupiter." "I therefore concluded, and decided unhesitatingly, that there are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury around the Sun which was at length established as clear as daylight by numerous other subsequent observations. When on January 8th, led by some fatality, I turned again to look at the same part of the heavens, I found a very different state of things, for there were three little stars all west of Jupiter, and nearer together than on the previous night." "On the 7th day of January in the present year, 1610, in the first hour of the following night, when I was viewing the constellations of the heavens through a telescope, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my view, and as I had prepared for myself a very excellent instrument, I noticed a circumstance which I had never been able to notice before, namely that three little stars, small but very bright, were near the planet and although I believed them to belong to a number of the fixed stars, yet they made me somewhat wonder, because they seemed to be arranged exactly in a straight line, parallel to the ecliptic, and to be brighter than the rest of the stars, equal to them in magnitude. In his book " Sidereus Nuncius" ("Starry Messenger"), published in 1610, Galileo wrote: When NASA sent a mission to Jupiter in the 1990s, it was called Galileo in honor of the famed astronomer. Of all of his telescope discoveries, he is perhaps most known for his discovery of the four most massive moons of Jupiter, now known as the Galilean moons: Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto.
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