The 10 greatest space discoveries
Galileo discovers
Jupiter’s moons Discovered: 1610
Taking a look through a good pair of
binoculars or a telescope at the bright
star in the night sky that represents
Jupiter, you are very likely to spot the
gas giant’s most prominent moons –
Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto.
The quartet of satellites didn’t
go unnoticed, not even in the early
1600s, as Galileo Galilei pointed
his telescope at the planet. Writing
down his observations, the Italian
Io
With over 400 active volcanoes,
Io is Saturn’s fourth largest moon.
Galileo discovered Io in 1610,
where at this time, the moon
appeared as nothing more than a
point of light.
Ganymede
Covered in impact craters,
Ganymede is not only the largest
of Jupiter’s moons but is also the
largest moon in the Solar System,
while its mass is just over twice
that of our Moon.
Cosmic
Microwave
Background
Radiation
Discovered: 1965
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at
the Bell Telephone Laboratories in
New Jersey never imagined that they
would find damming evidence for the
Big Bang – which occurred some 13.7
billion years ago – along with support
for an expanding universe previously
postulated by Edwin Hubble while
experimenting with the Holmdel
22
astronomer didn’t see all of the
moons, but only three which he, at
the time, believed were stars fixed in
positions close to what we now know
as a great gas giant striped with belts
of angry swirling storms.
Galileo’s observations between
December 1609 and January 1610 saw
the fourth moon make its appearance
from behind Jupiter and caused him
to rethink his original thoughts as
Horn Antenna. The supersensitivity
of the antenna, which was built to
detect radio waves ricocheting off
echo balloon satellites, unintentionally
encountered the readings for Cosmic
Microwave Background (CMB)
radiation, thermal radiation left over
from the Big Bang, as a low yet steady
interference. This noise, which they
to what the four points of light were.
Watching them further, he realised
they were orbiting as moons and as
their discoverer, Jupiter’s four largest
satellites of many were named after
the astronomer and dubbed the outside the atmospheric confines
Galilean moons. of our planet, but also had its part
Galileo’s finding not only spelt in the debunking of Ptolemy’s idea
out the turning point in which the of our Earth being at the centre of
telescope was seen as an invaluable everything with the stars, Sun and
instrument for uncovering the cosmos planets revolving around it.
Callisto
Taking almost 17 days to orbit
Jupiter, Callisto is 99% the
diameter of Mercury and the third-
largest moon in the Solar System.
Jupiter
While no one knows for sure who discovered
Jupiter, Galileo realised that four moons were
orbiting it, adding more evidence to the theory
that Earth was not at the centre of the universe.
Europa
Sixth closest to Jupiter, Europa is thought to have
an iron core at the centre of its silicate rock and
water ice encrusted surface. Europa is the smallest
of the four Galilean satellites.
Temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background over the full sky from
data returned by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) spacecraft
found had an intensity 100 times more Clearing away pigeons nesting in
powerful than the physicists were the antenna as possible sources of
expecting, seeped into every corner interference, Penzias and Wilson found
of the sky and was present from day that the noise did not disappear. The
through to night. CMB that permeates the universe had
Could this finding have been a been found and the physicists had
mistake? Fortunately not for the duo, measured it at an average temperature
who in 1978 received a Nobel Prize of -270.15 degrees Celsius (-450
for Physics for their joint discovery. degrees Fahrenheit).
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