Ancient Skies

NARRATOR

Within a year, Galileo built a telescope that packed an unprecedented 20 times magnification. Pointed towards the skies, we could now see further than any human had before and instantly reveal new truths about our universe. In 1609, Galileo turns his telescope to the skies, and he begins to look at many things. He looks at the surface of the Moon. The surface of the Moon, Galileo sees through his telescope, is not a perfect crystalline sphere. It has mountains. It is rough. Galileo sees the matter of the Moon to be similar to the Earth, and perhaps, if the matter on the Earth and the Moon are the same, motion works similarly in the heavens as it does on the Earth.

NARRATOR

Galileo's telescope also revealed to him entirely new objects in the skies. With this telescope, Galileo was able to observe for the first time that Jupiter had moons orbiting around it, something that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. This marked a major advance in astronomy because, for the first time, scientists saw that the Earth wasn't the only object with moons orbiting around it. One of Galileo's great proofs, what he sees as the ultimate proof of the Copernican cosmos, is when he turns his telescope to look at Venus. He sees that Venus is undergoing phases, like the Moon. So, Venus isn't just solid all the time, Venus waxes and wanes. For him, this shows that Venus is inside the orbit of the Earth, and is also orbiting around the Sun. That it's not just that the Earth is orbiting around the Sun, but that the other planets are as well.

NARRATOR

Armed with his telescope, Galileo had made more discoveries than generations of astronomers combined. And he was now certain that he held proof that the Church's official model of the cosmos was wrong.