Timeline of stellar astronomy

Timeline of stellar astronomy

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