Timeline of stellar astronomy
2300 BC — First great period of star naming in China.134 BC — Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent luminosities185 AD — Chinese astronomers become the first to observe a supernova, the SN 185964 — Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) writes the Book of Fixed Stars, in which he makes the first recorded observations of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud, and lists numerous stars with their positions, magnitudes, brightness, and colour, and gives drawings for each constellation1000s (decade) — The Persian astronomer, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, describes the Milky Way galaxy as a collection of numerous nebulous stars1006 — Ali ibn Ridwan and Chinese astronomers observe the SN 1006, the brightest stellar event ever recorded1054 — Chinese and Arab astronomers observe the SN 1054, responsible for the creation of the Crab Nebula, the only nebula whose creation was observed1181 — Chinese astronomers observe the SN 1181 supernova1580 — Taqi al-Din measures the right ascension of the stars at the Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din using an "observational clock" he invented and which he described as "a mechanical clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the seconds"1596 — David Fabricius notices that Mira's brightness varies1672 — Geminiano Montanari notices that Algol's brightness varies1686 — Gottfried Kirch notices that Chi Cygni's brightness varies1718 — Edmund Halley discovers stellar proper motions by comparing his astrometric measurements with those of the Greeks1782 — John Goodricke notices that the brightness variations of Algol are periodic and proposes that it is partially eclipsed by a body moving around it1784 — Edward Pigott discovers the first Cepheid variable star1838 — Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Struve, and Friedrich Bessel measure stellar parallaxes1844 — Friedrich Bessel explains the wobbling motions of Sirius and Procyon by suggesting that these stars have dark companions1906 — Arthur Eddington begins his statistical study of stellar motions1908 — Henrietta Leavitt discovers the Cepheid period-luminosity relation1910 — Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell study the relation between magnitudes and spectral types of stars1924 — Arthur Eddington develops the main sequence mass-luminosity relationship1929 — George Gamow proposes hydrogen fusion as the energy source for stars1938 — Hans Bethe and Carl von Weizsäcker detail the proton-proton chain and CNO cycle in stars1939 — Rupert Wildt realizes the importance of the negative hydrogen ion for stellar opacity1952 — Walter Baade distinguishes between Cepheid I and Cepheid II variable stars1953 — Fred Hoyle predicts a carbon-12 resonance to allow stellar triple alpha reactions at reasonable stellar interior temperatures1961 — Chūshirō Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of fully convective stars1963 — Fred Hoyle and William A. Fowler conceive the idea of supermassive stars1964 — Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman develop a general relativistic theory of stellar pulsations and show that supermassive stars are subject to a general relativistic instability1967 — Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer discover the Becklin-Neugebauer Object at 10 micrometres1977 — (May 25) The Star Wars film is released and became a worldwide phenomenon, boosting interests in stellar systems.2012 — (May 2) First visual proof of existence of black-holes. Suvi Gezari's team in Johns Hopkins University, using the Hawaiian telescope Pan-STARRS 1, publish images of a supermassive black hole 2.7 million light-years away swallowing a red giant.