Abyssal plains were not recognized as distinct physiographic features of the sea floor until the late 1940s and, until very recently, none had been studied on a systematic basis. They are poorly preserved in the sedimentary record, because they tend to be consumed by the subduction process.
The first man to discover that the earth moves around the sun was an Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei.
Actually that isn't completely true. The Kuiper Belt was discovered in 1992 by David Jewitt and Jane Luu when they found the first Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). Jan Oort discovered the Oort Cloud which is much farther out (50000 AU from the sun) than the Kuiper Belt (30-50 AU from the sun). The Kuiper Belt is named after astronomer Gerard Kuiper for his theories on an area in the solar system past Pluto where short-period comets derived from.