Galaxies
Year of Discovery: 1750
What Is It? Our sun is not the center of the universe but is rather part of a giant,
disc-shaped cluster of stars that floats through space.
Who Discovered It? Thomas Wright and William Herschel
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
The discovery that stars are clumped into galaxies represents the first advance in efforts to describe the actual shape of the universe and the distribution of stars in it. Wright’s
theory of galaxies was the first astronomical work to place our sun not in the center of the
universe, but in a tightly packed cluster of stars that Wright called a galaxy. This discovery
led science a giant step forward in its efforts to understand the vast universe of which our
sun and Earth represent only tiny and very ordinary specks. Twenty-five years later,
Herschel conducted careful observational studies that proved Wright was right.
How Was It Discovered?
For thousands of year