Galileo

[gal-uh-ley-oh, -lee-oh, gah-lee-le-aw]

noun

1. Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642, Italian physicist and astronomer.

2. Aerospace.,  a U.S. space probe designed to take photographs and obtain other scientific information while orbiting the planet Jupiter.

Galileo

¹

/ ˌɡælɪˈleɪəʊ /

noun

1. full name Galileo Galilei. 1564–1642, Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He discovered the isochronism of the pendulum and demonstrated that falling bodies of different weights descend at the same rate. He perfected the refracting telescope, which led to his discovery of Jupiter's satellites, sunspots, and craters on the Earth's moon. He was forced by the Inquisition to recant his support of the Copernican system

Galileo

²

/ ˌɡælɪˈleɪəʊ /

noun

1. a US spacecraft, launched 1989, that entered orbit around Jupiter in late 1995 to study the planet and its major satellites; burned up in the planet's atmosphere in 2003

Galileo

1. An Italian scientist of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; his full name was Galileo Galilei. Galileo proved that objects with different masses fall at the same velocity. One of the first persons to use a telescope to examine objects in the sky, he saw the moons of Jupiter, the mountains on the moon, and sunspots.

Authorities of the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo to renounce his belief in the model of the solar system proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus. Galileo had to assert that the Earth stands still, and the sun revolves around it. A famous legend holds that Galileo, after making this public declaration about a motionless Earth, muttered, “Nevertheless, it does move.”

Example Sentences

The European Galileo system now supports this by broadcasting its corrections free of charge.

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In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to show that the Milky Way was composed of a huge number of faint stars.

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In 2013 he and his wife made headlines when they restored and then donated the “Star Trek” Galileo shuttlecraft prop to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

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It took the Vatican until 1992 to admit that astronomer Galileo Galilei was right almost four centuries earlier about the Sun being the center of our solar system.

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The Webb is just the latest example of how humanity's view of the cosmos has been expanding steadily with each new seeing tool, beginning when Galileo first turned a telescope on the skies in 1609.

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