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Galileo Galileo was born February 15, 1564 in Florence and educated in Padua. He was the first of six kids. His family belonged to the nobility but they were not opulent. Galileo was an Italian physicist and astronomer who discovered the law of falling bodies and the law of the pendulum. He also perfected the first telescope which he used to identify the moons of Jupiter and the lunar surface. Galileo also ascertained that the Milky Way was made of stars. The contributions made by Galileo to mechanics and science as a whole remain fundamental and extremely accurate to this very day. Galileo was strongly and thoroughly influenced by the Church but his beliefs contradicted those of many Catholics. In a letter to the the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo defends his theories against scholarly and religious speculatio