A Few of Oort's Discoveries
- In 1924, Oort discovered the galactic halo, a group of stars orbiting the Milky Way but outside the main disk.
- In 1927, he calculated that the center of the Milky Way was 5,900 parsecs (19,200 light years) from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.
- In 1932, by measuring the motions of stars in the Milky Way he was the first to find evidence for dark matter, when he found the mass of the galactic plane must be more than the mass of the material that can be seen.
- He showed that the Milky Way had a mass 100 billion times that of the Sun.
- In 1950, he suggested that comets came from a common region of the Solar System (now called the Oort cloud).
- He found that the light from the Crab Nebula was polarized, and produced by synchrotron emission.
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Famous quotes containing the word discoveries:
“It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)