Curated category
Astronomical hypotheses
- Gaia hypothesisIn September 1965, chemist James Lovelock sat at a desk in California working on methods to detect life on Mars. He was employed by the Jet Propulsion…
- Cosmological constantIn 1917, Albert Einstein published a paper titled Cosmological considerations in the General Theory of Relativity. He added a specific term to his field…
- Oort cloudIn 1950, the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort presented a radical idea to explain the origin of long-period comets. He proposed that these icy bodies resided in a…
- Mysterium CosmographicumJohannes Kepler stood in Graz on the 19th of July 1595. He taught a class about the periodic conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the zodiac.
- MultiverseIn the sixth century BCE, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander first suggested that infinite worlds might exist.
- Titius–Bode lawIn 1764, a French philosopher named Charles Bonnet wrote about planetary distances in a textbook. The text described a sequence of numbers that seemed to…
- Vulcan (hypothetical planet)In 1611, the German astronomer Christoph Scheiner reported seeing dark spots on the Sun. He believed these were small planets orbiting closer to the star…