Center of the Galaxy
On April 14th, 1927, Jan Oort published his paper ‘Observational evidence confirming Lindblad's hypothesis of a rotation of the galactic system’, in which Oort calculated the distance to the center of the galaxy. On this paper he got the wrong number (19,200 light years), but he later proved it to be 40,000 light years from Earth.
Source: Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980
Public Domain
Back to archive
Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!