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Heliocentric system


Heliocentrism is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the center of the Solar System. Historically, Heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center. The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, but at least in the medieval world, Aristarchus's Heliocentrism attracted little attention—possibly because of the loss of scientific works of the Hellenistic Era.

It was not until the 16th century that a geometric mathematical model of a heliocentric system was presented, by the Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus, leading to the Copernican Revolution. In the following century, Johannes Kepler elaborated upon and expanded this model to include elliptical orbits, and Galileo Galilei presented supporting observations made using a telescope.

With the observations of William Herschel, Friedrich Bessel, and others, astronomers realized that the sun, although near the center of the solar system, was not the center of the universe.

While the sphericity of the Earth was widely recognized in Greco-Roman astronomy from at least the 3rd century BC, the Earth's daily rotation and yearly orbit around the Sun was never universally accepted until the Copernican Revolution.

While a moving Earth was proposed at least from the 4th century BC in Pythagoreanism, and a fully developed heliocentric model was developed by Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC, these ideas were not successful in replacing the view of a static spherical Earth, and from the 2nd century AD the predominant model, which would be inherited by medieval astronomy, was the geocentric model described in Ptolemy's Almagest.


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