Elena Herrero: GALILEO, WAS HE REALLY THE FIRST?

Hi folks! Do you want to know a bit more about Galileo?

In 1609, Galileo Galilei turned his own version of a kind of telescope towards the sky, using a magnification of just 30. He decided that the earth moved around the sun and not vice versa; as you know, as a result of this, he was accused of heresy by the Church, since they could not hold back science.

Galileo is supposed to have been the first human being to see the moon´s craters, as well as Venus, Jupiter or the stars of the Milky Way, but was Galileo really the first?

For centuries, the Italian scientist was considered the first man to have used a telescope to study the heavens, but nowadays new evidence has appeared which suggests that Galileo was actually the second person to achieve this scientific breakthrough. Research that has recently come to light shows that Thomas Harriot, an unknown English astronomer, had drawn some maps, never published before, with drafts of the moon, Jupiter´s satellites, sunspots and even Halley's Comet, five months earlier than Galileo´s drawings. 

But Galileo was also on the news some years ago because of another macabre reason: Some Italian scientists were trying to exhume Galileo´s body in order to access his DNA, in an attempt to understand how the astronomer was able to developed his revolutionary theories about the universe, bearing in mind that he was gradually going blind, because he suffered from a degenerative eye disease. It might explain some of the mistakes he made in his drawings.

Well, I´ve attached a couple of great YouTube clip related to Galileo. Enjoy them!

Thank you so much once again, dear Elena. Your post suitably supplements the reading about the famous Italian astronomer in unit 2. Very enlightening indeed!