During the 1500’s, the idea of a Heliocentric universe was new and controversial. The world and church agreed that the universe was Geocentric, meaning that Earth was at the center of everything. The church wanted to silence rumors of a heliocentric universe, so they hired Copernicus to prove egocentricity. After studying for the remained of his life, Copernicus was convinced that the sun was, in factm at the center of the solar system. For fear of angering the church and being exiled, his findings were not published until after his death.
Soon after, Galileo Galilei, who was a teacher at the time, invented the telescope. For financial support, he approached the military who used the telescope mainly for land. But soon he pointed it to the stars and while he was studying them, he also began to aggravate the church. He discovered Jupiter’s moons, the phases of Venus, sunspots, and studied the geography of the Moon. Since he had a closer relationship with the pope, he was not excommunicated. Rather, he was sentenced to live his life confined to his home.
Tycho Brahe soon entered the scene and, without a telescope, mapped the stars and wrote his calculations and plots down. Since he was an observer and not a mathematician, he hired Kepler to make sense of his findings. Kepler did so and created Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion.
Newton also had many astronomical findings. Not only did he ponder gravity, which explains why plants orbit stars, etc., he also discovered that orbits take the shape of conic sections. These conic sections are the circle, the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola.
