Facts About Gallileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. In 1583, Galileo entered the University of Pisa to study medicine. He enrolled to do a medical degree but never finished. Galileo left the university in 1585 before earning his degree. He continued to study mathematics, supporting himself with minor teaching positions. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism.  Galileo built(improved) his first telescope in 1609, which featured three times magnification. Later, he developed models that could see up to 32 times magnification. Galileo is often incorrectly credited with the creation of a telescope. Instead, he significantly improved upon them. When NASA sent a mission to Jupiter in the 1990s, it was called Galileo in honor of the famed astronomer. He also worked on a pendulum clock, although the first working one was built by Christiaan Huygens. Along with making contributions to the development of a universal clock, Galileo also created a military compass and a thermometer. He published his first astronomical observations in 1610. The collection was called "Starry Messenger." His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter  and the observation and analysis of sunspots. In 1610, he made observations of 4 objects surrounding Jupiter that behaved unlike stars, these turned out to be Jupiter's for largest satellite moons: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. They were later renamed the Galilean satellites in honor of Galileo himself. Galileo refused to believe in Kepler's theory that the moon caused the tides, instead believing it was due to the nature of the Earth's rotation. Galileo also found that the Milky Way was actually close-packed stars rather than some sort of nebula. He was able to locate a number of stars previously unseen with the naked eye. According to his notes, he observed the planet Neptune in 1612, but did not recognize it as a planet. He thought it was simply another dim star. Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, praised Galileo for his contributions to the fields of astronomy and physics in December of 2008. Later in his life, Galileo became blind. There have been theories that his blindness came from his telescopic research, but most likely he lost his sight from cataracts or glaucoma. He died on January 8, 1642 at the age of 77 in Arcetri, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Italy.