The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer presents the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light.
Rmer's determination of the speed of light was the demonstration in 1676 that light has a finite speed and so does not travel instantaneously. The discovery is usually attributed to Danish astronomer Ole Rmer, who was working at the Royal Observatory in Paris at the time.
By timing the eclipses of the Jovian moon Io, Rmer estimated that light would take about 22 minutes to travel a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit around the Sun. This would give light a velocity of about 220,000 kilometres per second, about 26% lower than the true value of 299,792 km/s.
Rmer's theory was controversial at the time that he announced it and he never convinced the director of the Paris Observatory, Giovanni Domenico Cassini, to fully accept it. However, it quickly gained support among other natural philosophers of the period such as Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton. It was finally confirmed nearly two decades after Rmer's death, with the explanation in 1729 of stellar aberration by the English astronomer James Bradley.
An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies – in either observational (by analyzing the data) or theoretical astronomy. Examples of topics or fields astronomers study include planetary science, solar astronomy, the origin or evolution of stars, or the formation of galaxies. A related but distinct subject is physical cosmology, which studies the Universe as a whole.