![]() It probably also helped that the subject was so difficult that only highly educated people could understand it. The church did not immediately condemn the book as heretical, perhaps because the printer added a note that said even though the book's theory was unusual, if it helped astronomers with their calculations, it didn't matter if it wasn't really true. He diplomatically dedicated the book to Pope Paul III. He didn't publish the book, however, until 1543, just two months before he died. – Red giant stars: Facts, definition & the future of the sun – Parker Solar Probe: Mission to touch the sun – Galileo Galilei: Biography, inventions & other facts (opens in new tab) He laid out his model of the solar system and the path of the planets. In it, Copernicus established that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth. ![]() He also suggested that Earth's rotation accounted for the rise and setting of the sun, the movement of the stars, and that the cycle of seasons was caused by Earth's revolutions around it.įinally, he (correctly) proposed that Earth's motion through space caused the retrograde motion of the planets across the night sky (planets sometimes move in the same directions as stars, slowly across the sky from night to night, but sometimes they move in the opposite, or retrograde, direction).Ĭopernicus finished the first manuscript of his book, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (" On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (opens in new tab)") in 1532. In it, he proposed that the center of the universe was not Earth, but that the sun lay near it. In 1514, Copernicus distributed a handwritten book to his friends that set out his view of the universe. Some planets required as many as seven circles, creating a cumbersome model many felt was too complicated to have naturally occurred. To account for it, the current model, based on the Greek astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy's view, incorporated a number of circles within circles - epicycles - inside of a planet's path. Astronomers called this retrograde motion. One of the glaring mathematical problems with this model was that the planets, on occasion, would travel backward across the sky over several nights of observation. The sun, the stars, and all of the planets revolved around it. ![]() ![]() In Copernicus' lifetime, most believed that Earth held its place at the center of the universe. The Copernican Planisphere, illustrated in 1661 by Andreas Cellarius. ![]()
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