How far is our Sun from our planet? How far is the Moon? How far are the stars that we see in the night sky? While some of these questions are already answered by today’s science, hundreds of years ago people did not know how to answer these questions, but they created ways to attempt to answer them.
Ingenious efforts to measure distances to them began in earnest in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C., and astronomers and astrophysicists today, with high-powered telescopes and computers, still ponder the universe and attempt to tease out answers to millennia-old questions.
Two hundred years ago, a man named Joseph von Fraunhofer made one of the most important discoveries that would help astrophysicists today in calculating the distances of celestial objects. He had found “the hidden code in starlight.”
Learn more about Fraunhofer’s life, as well as his discovery over at Nautilus.
(Image Credit: Hans/ Pixabay)