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Solar History Timeline
Our understanding of the sun and its many details is part of a much longer history of events that had to unfold. These pages will take you on a journey from the birth of the cosmos, to the most recent discoveries about our nearest star.
New Technologies and Newer Ideas
1609 - Galileo uses telescope to study
sunspots.
1619 - Report of naked-eye sunspot by Chinese
1621 - Pierre Gassendi first uses the term 'Aurora
Borealis'
1624 - Report of naked-eye sunspot by Chinese
1638 - Report of naked-eye sunspot by Chinese
1645 - Maunder Sunspot Minimum
starts
1715 - Earliest sketch of solar
corona
1716 - Dramatic aurora seen in England
1722 - George Graham discovers that compass needle always in
motion.
1740 - Anders Celcius and Olof Hoiter discover magnetic
storms
1770 - Wilcke discovers aurora aligned with magnetic field of
Earth,
1777 - Mairan proposes aurora caused by earth entering
Zodiacal light
1833 - Ross proposes aurora are light reflected from polar ice
and snow
1848 - Auroral 'earth currents' disrupt telegraph lines
worldwide
1851 - Heinreich Schwabe discovers the
11-year sunspot cycle
1856 - Edward Sabine discovers aurora
connected to sunspot cycle
1856 -Olmstead concludes aurora caused by events external to
earth.
1859 - Visible solar flare sighted by
Carrington and Hodgson.
1860 - Elias Loomis maps out the auroral oval zone on
earth.
1860 - Coronal Mass Ejection first
spotted during a total solar eclipse
1872 - Great Aurora seen in India, Cuba, Paris..
1979 - George Ellis offers first space
weather forecast
1881 - Prof. De La Rue creates artificial aurora in a vacuum
tube.
1882 - Henry Draper reveals solar
spectrum, not incandescent gas.
1882 - Balfour Stewart proposes auroral currents in upper
atmosphere
1889 - Veeder discovers that major aurora can reoccur every
27-days
1892 - George Ellery Hale invents
spectroheliograph to study solar flares.
1894 - Great Aurora
1898 - Kristian Berkelund proposes
electrical rays from sun cause aurora
1902 - Kennely and Heavyside propose 'ionosphere' layer
1908 - George Ellery Hale detects intense magnetic fields near
sunspots
1908 - Great Aurora
1909 - Birkeland creates a Terella to mimic aurora
1915 - 'wireless outage' in Northern Europe caused by an
aurora
1918 - Sydney Chapman describes magnetic
field of sun and earth as system.
1919 - Whistlers heard for first time in World War I.
1920 - Great Aurora
1921 - Major aurora seen world-wide.
1923 - Babcock and McLennan identify
auroral 'green' light as Oxygen III
1925 - Beginning of studies of short-wave disruptions
1925 - Appleton and Barnett detect the ionosphere layer
1926 - Great Aurora
1934 - Hale publishes detailed study of
solar flares
1937 - The term 'solar flare' appears for the first time in
newspaper.
1938 - Great Aurora
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Image
Credits: Proto solar nebula: Spitzer Space Telescope
(http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/041209telecon/ssc2004-22a.shtml)
Stonehenge and Stars: Knowth.com
(http://www.knowth.com/wallpaper.htm) Solar Flare diagram : Space
Sciences Lab, UC Berkeley.
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