Discovery of Helium
In 1868 Janssen discovered how to observe solar prominences without an eclipse. While observing the solar eclipse of August 18, 1868 at Guntur, in Andhra Pradesh, British India, he noticed a bright yellow line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm in the spectrum of the chromosphere of the Sun. This was the first observation of this particular spectral line, and one possible source for it was an element not yet discovered on the earth. Janssen was at first ridiculed since no element had ever been detected in space before being found on Earth.
On 20 October of the same year, Joseph Norman Lockyer also observed the same yellow line in the solar spectrum and concluded that it was caused by an unknown element, after unsuccessfully testing to see if it were some new type of hydrogen. This was the first time a chemical element was discovered on an extraterrestrial body before being found on the earth. Lockyer and the English chemist Edward Frankland named the element with the Greek word for the Sun, ἥλιος (helios).
Read more about this topic: Pierre Janssen
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