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For many thousands of years, humans believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Aristotle was the first to suggest that the earth might revolve around the sun, in the fourth century BC. He discounted the idea, though, because he thought that if the earth actually moved, we would be able to see the stars move also. He didn't realize that because the stars are so far away, a person needs a telescope that is very accurate to find out that the stars do move. Aristarchus, a Greek astronomer, was the first person to truly believe that our solar system was geocentric, in the third century BC. The idea didn't catch on again until the sixteenth century, when Nicholas Copernicus provided some proof to support the heliocentric model of the solar system. In 1609, Johannes Kepler used observations made by another astronomer, Tycho Brahe, to accurately predict the position of Mars in the sky, based on the heliocentric idea. From there, additional proof continued to stream in until now, when the idea is generally accepted as the correct depiction of our solar system. |
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