Timeline of knowledge about the interstellar and intergalactic medium

• 1848 - Lord Rosse studies M1 and names it the Crab Nebula
• 1864 - William Huggins studies the spectrum of the Orion Nebula and shows that it is a cloud of gas
• 1927 - Ira Bowen explains unidentified spectral lines from space as forbidden transition liness
• 1930 - Robert Trumpler discovers absorption by interstellar dust by comparing the angular sizes and brightnesses of globular clusters
• 1944 - Hendrik van de Hulst predicts the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral interstellar hydrogen
• 1951 - H.I. Ewen and Edward Purcell observe the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral interstellar hydrogen
• 1956 - Lyman Spitzer predicts coronal gas around the Milky Way
• 1965 - James Gunn and Bruce Peterson use observations of the relatively low absorption of the blue component of the Lyman-alpha line from 3C9 to strongly constrain the density and ionization state of the intergalactic medium
• 1969 - Lewis Snyder, David Buhl, Ben Zuckerman, and Patrick Palmer find interstellar formaldehyde
• 1970 - Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson find interstellar carbon monoxide
• 1970 - George Carruthers observes molecular hydrogen in space
• 1977 - Christopher McKee and Jeremiah Ostriker propose a three component theory of the interstellar medium