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Asked by Kayleighjw to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 21 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Sami.
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Elliot Jokl answered on 21 Jun 2016:
That is a really interesting question! I spent a little while googling and thinking about this one.
It almost seems like a silly question (the best questions do!), because of course space has always been there, and even the cavemen will have looked up at the night sky and seen stars and so we might think they had some sense of what was out there. But they had no way of knowing what the stars were, or how far away they were, so they had no idea what space was.
I guess the closest answer is the people who first started studying the sky and noticed that there were some things that move across the sky in certain patterns. This helped them put together a model of how different things moved in space. We don’t know much about who these people were – Ptolemy is apparently one of the first people who had records that have survived. He was an ancient Greek in the 2nd century AD and he was the one who put this information together and made the first model of what space looked like. A lot if it was very wrong, for example it had the Earth at the center of our solar system and not the sun, but it is still an impressive achievement.
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Thomas Biggans answered on 21 Jun 2016:
This question makes me think of Edwin Hubble, have you ever heard of the hubble telescope that was named after him?
Hubble discovered that there was space outside of our own galaxy the milky way in fact he measured the distance our nearest neighbour Andromeda is from us. He also discovered that the universe was getting bigger over time proving Einstein’s initial theory right.
The pictures taken by the hubble telescope are the ones that really inspire me to learn about science so although he might not have been the first to discover space outside of our planet he was the first to show us how big space really is.
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