Chronology of Stellar Astronomy
| -134 | Hipparchus creates the magnitude scale of stellar apparent luminosities. |
| 1596 | David Fabricus 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 Piggot 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 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 Weizsacker 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 | Chushiro Hayashi publishes his work on the Hayashi track of fully convective stars. |
| 1963 | Fred Hoyle and William 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 | Gerry Neugebauer and Eric Becklin discover the Becklin-Neugebauer object at 10 microns. |