Galileo And Copernicus: The Heliocentric Model Of The Planet

Galileo and Copernicus were two extremely influential astronomers. They believed in the heliocentric model of our solar system, or the idea that the planets revolved around the Sun. We all accept this model today as fact, but back in their time, the thought of it was pure blasphemy. The widely accepted idea at the time, as supported by the almighty Catholic Church, was the geocentric model. In this model, the Earth is central to nearly everything, and is orbited by the Sun, moon, and other special bodies. This idea has been discredited, as it is simply untrue. Back then, you either accepted it, or were a rebel of society. Copernicus was well aware of the consequences, and waited until soon before his death to release his theory of the heliocentric
This is known as a process called peer review. Few and far between, more and more supporters of the Copernican model started to emerge. Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, became one of the more popular supporters of Galileo and his discoveries. He is most famous for his Laws of Planetary motion, which detail how planets move in space. According to his first law, planets moved in and elliptical motion around the Sun. He noticed this in his observations of Mars, where predictions in its where it was supposed to be in the sky were inaccurate. This led Kepler to determine that planets moved in an ellipse, and that one part of its orbit was more eccentric than the other. Because of this change in eccentricity, planets move at different speeds when they get closer to the Sun and slower when they are at the part of their orbit that is further away. Like Galileo, his findings provided great evidence in support of the heliocentric model, but the difference between the two was that Kepler didn’t face the same persecution that Galileo did. One possible reason for this was that this was after the Protestant movement of the 16th century, in which more Christian protestant sects started to emerge and the Catholic Church started to lose influence on Europe. His works were studied by more scientists who agreed that geocentrism was no longer true and that the heliocentric model triumphed as fact. As the modern world grew to become more and more secular, people spent less time worrying about religion and more time on academic pursuits. The Catholic Church couldn’t put heretics under house arrest anymore, and eventually became powerful only in the sense of influence. In fact, in more recent times, the church came out and, through a 1992 Vatican scientific panel, admitted that