ANSWER: Edmond Halley is most famous for his theory that comets have elliptical orbits around the sun & over time they will return to the same point. Because his theory proved to be true Halley's Comet was named after him.
Edmond Halley, FRS was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist who is best known for computing the orbit of the eponymous Halley's Comet.
Born: November 8, 1656, Haggerston, London, United Kingdom
Died: January 14, 1742, Greenwich, United Kingdom
Discovered: Halley's Comet
Education: The Queen's College, Oxford, University of Oxford, St Paul's School, London
The English astronomer Edmund Halley was a good friend of Isaac Newton. He used Newton's new theory of gravitation to find the orbits of comets from their recorded positions in the sky as a function of time. He found that the bright comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 had almost the same orbits, and when he accounted for the gravitational perturbation on the cometary orbits from Jupiter and Saturn, he concluded that these were different appearances of the same comet.
Halley did not live to see his prediction tested because he died in 1742. But on Christmas night, 1758, the comet reappeared in a spectacular vindication of his bold Hypothesis and of Newton's gravitational theory. Tracing back in the historical records for recordings of bright comets and their positions in the sky, it was concluded that Halley had been observed periodically as far back as 240 B.C. The most recent return was in 1986, and the predicted next appearance of Halley in the inner Solar System will be in 2061.
Edmond Halley studied at...
Oxford University, but dropped out, to observe stars in the southern hemisphere. After his return to England, Halley was active in the new Royal Society of London. There he helped his friend Isaac Newton with his work on gravity and the writing of the Principia, and even paid