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Galileo Galilei Research Paper

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Who is Galileo Galilei? Astronomer. Galileo’s most common attribute is his work as an astronomer, refining the newly invented telescope, discovering moons, and proving the accepted model of Aristotelian cosmology wrong, while providing empirical evidence of Copernican Heliocentrism reinventing astronomy forever. Early in the 1600’s Galileo discovers the relatively new invention from the Netherlands called the telescope, and promptly builds his own, improving on the design, increasing the magnification, and the clarity of the image. The earlier versions of Galileo's telescopes had a magnification of 8x to around 10x magnification but through time, he continually refined the design eventually getting to around 30x magnification. Though Galileo was more than likely not the first to gaze into the heaven with a telescope, he was one of the very first to do …show more content…

Even before the construction of his telescope, Galilei read about Thomas Harriot's research of the Moon where he wrote about “strange spottednesse” of the Moon but lacked the ability to deduce the cause. Galileo, on the other hand, using some of his early life artistic knowledge was the first to deduce that these strange spots were actually landscape features such as mountains, and craters, casting their own shadows on the surface. Prior to this simple observation, the populace thought of the Moon as a heavenly body, and therefore perfect in orbit, and shape. This would be the first of many times where Galileo makes everyone think about the accepted geocentric model of the solar system. Galileo, moving much further out in the solar system, on January 7, 1610, is observing Jupiter and notices 3 fixed stars around the giant. Over the course of about a week Galilei continually monitors these stars and notices that are changing position relative to Jupiter, and one night a single star disappears. Given Galileo's acceptance of heliocentrism, he deduces that these fixed stars are actually 3 of Jupiter's

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