Galileo duped by diffraction
SEP 05, 2008
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.022654
Nature News : When Galileo Galilei used a new invention called the telescope to watch the heavens, he revolutionized astronomy. But his estimates of the distances to the stars were thousand of times too short.A scientist has now taken a closer look at Galileo’s seventeenth century results in an attempt to explain why the estimates were so far off the mark1. Christopher Graney, a physicist at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky, argues in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv that Galileo was tricked by a phenomenon that was only really understood two centuries later âmdash; diffraction.
© 2008 American Institute of Physics
