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Galaxies

Everything Everywhere Daily

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The Spiral Nebulae Debate

In the early 17th century, Galileo first looked at the Milky Way through a telescope and found that it consisted of a great many faint stars. Thomas Wright in 1750 theorized that the Milky Way was a collection of stars that was gravitationally held together. What exactly the spiral nebulae were became one of the most hotly contested controversies in astronomy in the early 20th century. It all came to a head on April 26, 1920 when the two proponents for each side of the debate presented their cases at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

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