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Timeline of solar astronomy

Timeline of solar astronomy

1613 - Galileo Galilei uses sunspot observations to demonstrate the rotation of the Sun
1619 - Johannes Kepler postulates a solar wind to explain the direction of comet tails
1802 - William Hyde Wollaston observes dark lines in the solar spectrum
1814 - Joseph Fraunhofer systematically studies the dark lines in the solar spectrum
1834 - Hermann Helmholtz proposes gravitational contraction as the energy source for the Sun
1843 - Heinrich Schwabe[?] announces his discovery of the sunspot cycle and estimates its period to be about ten years
1852 - Edward Sabine shows that sunspot number is correlated with geomagnetic field[?] variations
1859 - Richard Carrington[?] discovers solar flares
1860 - Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen discover that each chemical element has its own distinct set of spectral lines and use this fact to explain the solar dark lines
1861 - F.G.W. Sporer[?] discovers the variation of sunspot latitudes during a solar cycle
1863 - Richard Carrington[?] discovers the differential nature of solar rotation
1868 - Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen[?] and Norman Lockyer discover an unidentified yellow line in solar prominence[?] spectra and suggest it comes from a new element which they name "helium"
1893 - Edward Maunder[?] discovers the 1645-1715 Maunder sunspot minimum
1904 - Edward Maunder plots the first sunspot "butterfly diagram
1906 - Karl Schwarzschild explains solar limb darkening
1908 - George Hale[?] discovers the Zeeman splitting of spectral lines from sunspots
1942 - J.S. Hey[?] detects solar radio waves
1949 - Herbert Friedman[?] detects solar X-rays
1960 - Robert Leighton[?], Robert Noyes[?], and George Simon[?] discover solar five-minute oscillations by observing the Doppler shifts of solar dark lines
1961 - H. Babcock[?] proposes the magnetic coiling sunspot theory
1970 - Roger Ulrich[?], John Leibacher[?], and Robert Stein[?] deduce from theoretical solar models that the interior of the Sun could act as a resonant acoustic cavity[?]
1975 - Franz-Ludwig Deubner[?] makes the first accurate measurements of the period and horizontal wavelength of the five-minute solar oscillations

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