Free Custom «Galileo Galilei» Essay Paper

The Starry Messenger is a short treatise which was published by Galileo Galilei in New Latin. He published this treatise in March of the year 1610. According to history, this treatise is said to be the first one to be published on the basis of studies which are based on a telescope. Basically, this treatise contains the results of Galileo's early studies of the stars, the moon and other moons of Jupiter. This paper establishes the contents of Galileo Galilei; Starry Messenger, in a gist.From this book, we establish that Galileo made an improvement on the telescope which aided in his view of the night sky and the moon. Consequently, he managed to establish that the line which separated the day from the night was quite irregular on the places where it crossed the brighter areas whereas it was smooth on the darker areas. This made him to deduct that the darker regions were flat and low lying while the brighter regions were covered with mountains and were rough. A contradiction between his work and that of Aristotle is also noticed where he asserts that the Lunar mountains are at least four miles in height. Aristotle on the other hand held the view that the heavenly bodies must be perfectly smooth spheres since they were perfect than those of the earth (Sis, 2000).Concerning the stars, Galileo claimed that the telescope had the capability of seeing ten times more stars than the normal or naked eye. This enabled him to include star charts in his book which displayed the belt of the Pleiades and the Orion. This displayed the newly discovered stars. According to the Starry Messenger, Galileo claims that the nebulous stars found in the Ptolemaic star catalogue are not cloudy but made of several small stars. This led him to record that the Milky Way and the nebulae were a collection of too many small stars which could not be deducted into single stars by the naked eye (Sis, 2000).

 

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In the last bit of Starry Messenger, there is a report concerning the discovery of a straight line near Jupiter which is said to be because of four lines. This enabled Galileo to give specifications concerning the position of the Jupiter and its moons in relation to the way they appeared in the night. In addition, he deducted that since they shifted their positions from night to night and still they appeared to be on a straight line near Jupiter, he came to a conclusion that they comprised four bodies in the orbit around Jupiter (Whitehouse, 2009).

After making the discoveries relating to Jupiter, it seems that Galileo noticed that heliocentricity was the best model for explaining his facts. Therefore, he used Copernicus's model but made a few adjustments base on Kepler's work. This included the changing of the shifting from calling the orbits made by the planets from circles to ellipses. This helped Galileo in explaining his new data as he continued to discover that the phases of Venus happened as a result of the sun been positioned between the Venus and the earth during certain times of the year (Whitehouse, 2009).It is also concluded that the Medicean Stars at times tended to appear twice larger than other times although they have restricted orbits around the Jupiter. Jupiter and its neighboring stars tend to maintain their sizes when the Medicean Stars keep changing their size. The change of the size of these stars is said not to be the distance from the earth since a small circular rotation had nothing to facilitate its creation of this variation.