Timeline of stellar astronomy

• 1200 BC — Chinese star names appear on oracle bones used for divination.
• 134 BC — Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent luminosities
• 185 AD — Chinese astronomers become the first to observe a supernova, the SN 185
• 964 — Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi writes the Book of Fixed Stars, in which he makes the first recorded observations of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud, and List of [Arabic star names|lists numerous stars] with their positions, magnitudes, brightness, and colour, and gives drawings for each constellation
• 1000s — The Persian astronomer, Al-Biruni, describes the Milky Way galaxy as a collection of numerous nebulous stars
• 1006 — Ali ibn Ridwan and Chinese astronomers observe the SN 1006, the brightest stellar event ever recorded
• 1054 — Chinese and Arab astronomers observe the SN 1054, responsible for the creation of the Crab Nebula, the only nebula whose creation was observed
• 1181 — Chinese astronomers observe the SN 1181 supernova
• 1580 — Taqi al-Din measures the right ascension of the stars at the Constantinople observatory of Taqi ad-Din using an "observational clock" he invented and which he described as "a mechanical clock with three dials which show the hours, the minutes, and the seconds"
• 1596 — David Fabricius notices that Mira's brightness varies
• 1672 — Geminiano Montanari notices that Algol's brightness varies
• 1686 — Gottfried Kirch notices that Chi Cygni's brightness varies
• 1718 — Edmund Halley discovers stellar proper motions by comparing his astrometric measurements with those of the Greeks
• 1782 — John Goodricke notices that the brightness variations of Algol are periodic and proposes that it is partially eclipsed by a body moving around it
• 1784 — Edward Pigott discovers the first Cepheid variable star
• 1838 — Thomas Henderson, Friedrich Struve, and Friedrich Bessel measure stellar parallaxes
• 1844 — Friedrich Bessel explains the wobbling motions of Sirius and Procyon by suggesting that these stars have dark companions
• 1906 — Arthur Eddington begins his statistical study of stellar motions
• 1908 — Henrietta Leavitt discovers the Cepheid period-luminosity relation
• 1910 — Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell study the relation between magnitudes and spectral types of stars
• 1924 — Arthur Eddington develops the main sequence mass-luminosity relationship
• 1929 — George Gamow proposes hydrogen fusion as the energy source for stars
• 1938 — Hans Bethe and Carl von Weizsäcker detail the proton–proton chain and CNO cycle in stars
• 1939 — Rupert Wildt realizes the importance of the negative hydrogen ion for stellar opacity
• 1952 — Walter Baade distinguishes between Cepheid I and Cepheid II variable stars
• 1953 — Fred Hoyle predicts a carbon-12 resonance to allow stellar triple alpha reactions at reasonable stellar interior temperatures
• 1961 — Chūshirō Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of fully convective stars
• 1963 — Fred Hoyle and William A. Fowler conceive the idea of supermassive stars
• 1964 — Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman develop a general relativistic theory of stellar pulsations and show that supermassive stars are subject to a general relativistic instability
• 1967 — Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer discover the Becklin-Neugebauer Object at 10 micrometres
• 1977 — The Star Wars film is released and became a worldwide phenomenon, boosting interests in stellar systems.
• 2012 — First visual proof of existence of black-holes. Suvi Gezari's team in Johns Hopkins University, using the Hawaiian telescope Pan-STARRS 1, publish images of a supermassive black hole 2.7 million light-years away swallowing a red giant.