He was called a heretic for believing that the Sun, not the Earth, was the motionless center of the universe.
Also a firm believer in the heliocentric model, Galileo was placed under house arrest for much of his life for his beliefs after standing trial in Rome. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) built on the foundations of Copernicus’s work. Tycho Brahe was one of Copernicus’s successors however, he developed the Tychonic System, an essentially geocentric model which included some mathematical foundations of heliocentric models. He concurred with the scientists before him that the distance from the Earth to the Sun is negligible compared to the distance from the Earth to the stars. He said that the Earth’s motions include rotation, revolution, and annual tilting of the axis.
He stated that Earth is one of seven planets in the solar system around the Sun, which is stationary. He said that the center of the Earth is not the center of the universe, but is the center of gravity and the lunar sphere. While he still had the planets moving in patterns of circles rather than ellipses, he postulated that these circles had no one center. In 1543, in his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres he published his theory (which he had formulated much earlier). The previous system, the Ptolemaic system, was geocentric (with the Earth at the center of the universe). Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the universe, rather than the earth. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Renaissance polymath responsible for what some have called the “Copernican Revolution.” One of the most important contributions of Copernicus was to the field of astronomy. Many cite this era as the period during which modern science truly came to fruition, noting Galileo Galilei as the “father of modern science.” This post will cover the contributions of three highly important scientists from the era of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution: Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler. The Renaissance and Scientific Revolution were responsible for the introduction of ideas such as a heliocentric solar system and laws of planetary motion. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution constituted what was, perhaps, the most significant period of discovery and growth of the sciences in the whole of history.