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Space science has come a long way since July 4, 1776. Here's a look back at the saga
Celebrating America's 250th birthday, Space.com looks back at what our understanding of space was like in 1776 and what major developments occurred to change our thinking.
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On July 4, the United States of America celebrates its 250th birthday, marking the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and becoming a sovereign nation.
Today, this relatively young country leads the way in our understanding of the universe. It's where many major players in space science, like NASA, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Northwestern University, to name just a few.
And to celebrate 250 years of the U.S. as an independent nation, Space.com takes you on a journey through some common misunderstandings of the universe through the years and the roles American scientists played in clearing up that cosmic confusion.
By 1776, Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion had been around for about 89 years since the publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687. Five of the solar system planets had been discovered by the Ancient Greeks long before the birth of the U.S. Also, after a long struggle and many attempts to stifle this knowledge, humans were made aware that the Earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around, with the final nail in this coffin of misunderstanding laid by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 and Galileo Galilei in 1610, receiving an extra hammer blow from Newton in 1687.
Galileo had also delivered us to the understanding that not only was Earth's place in the solar system unique, but it wasn't even the only planet to possess moons, with the moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto discovered in 1610.
Clearly, by the time the U.S. was born we were already beginning to understand the universe and our place within it, but some major misunderstandings still persisted. One of the largest of these surrounded the nature of the sun itself.
America was formed during the "steam age," a period of industrialization that lasted from 1770 to 1914. This revolution was driven by coal, powering locomotives, ships, and factories, changing the shape of industry, transportation, and manufacturing. At this time, coal was the densest and most powerful fuel source known to humanity, so it is perhaps little wonder that many early scientists theorized the sun was actually a tremendously massive lump of burning coal.
Then, one of the oldest and most prominent scientific periodicals in the world, the U.S.-based Scientific American, wrote a 1863 article that first began the pushback against the sun as a burning lump of coal.