From the dawn of history until the beginning of the 17th century the known universe consisted of only 8 bodies: . ... The number of bodies in the solar system increased dramatically in the 19th century with the discovery of the asteroids (464 of which were known at by 1899) but only 9 more "major" bodies were discovered. ... So far, in 20th century 40 more major bodies (and thousands of comets and asteroids) have been discovered (27 by the Voyager probes) more than doubling the count again to 73: . ...
What follows is a brief list of benchmarks and discoveries that shaped our ideas on atoms and nuclei. ... Discovery of electrons . ... Comparing this to Faraday's results, one could get " Avogadro's number ", the number of (say) hydrogen atoms in one gram of hydrogen--an enormously large number. ... Similarly, energized atoms are only allowed to exist in one of a number of energy levels. ... By the way, Avogadro's number is 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.02 10 23 ) molecules in 1 gr hydrogen. ...