When was Venus first discovered as a planet?

Question

When was Venus first discovered as a planet?
And who by?

i know that it has been seen since pre-historic times due to it's visiblity, but does anyone know when it was actually found to be a planet or first recorded as one?

cheers!

Answer 1

Venus was known since early times (before history).
Before the telescope, Venus was known only as a 'wandering star' (this became the word "planet").
Several cultures thought it was two objects - a morning and evening star.
Pythagoras is usually credited with recognizing (sixth century BC) that it was a single object, though he believed that Venus orbited the Earth.
When Galileo first observed the planet in the early 17th century, he found that it showed phases like the Moon. That would be possible only if Venus orbited the Sun, and this was among the first observations to clearly contradict the geocentric model that the solar system was centered on the Earth.

Answer 2

Planet comes from the Greek word for "wanderer" because the planets move among the "fixed" stars. The Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were recognized as wanderers at least as early as Sumerian times and probably earlier. It was probably not recognized as being a world, like Earth is a world, until the telescope was invented and its disc could be seen.

Answer 3

Galileo looked at Venus through his telescope and saw the crescent of Venus,just like fazes of the moon and concluded it was a planet

Answer 4

Being one of the brightest objects in the sky, and easily distinguishable from the "fixed" stars by its motion against them, Venus has been known to be "not a star" since antiquity. No "scientist" discovered it. The same goes for the other bright, naked-eye visible planets: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Our word for "planet" comes from the Greek for "wanderer" -- the ancients called them that because they recognized their motion was different from the stars, and they seemed to "wander" among the stars. Galileo gets credit for being the first human to actually see that these "wanderers" weren't points of light like the stars, but had disc shapes are were indeed other worlds like earth.