WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer and mathematician known as the father of modern astronomy. He was the first European scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun, the heliocentric theory of the solar system.

Detailed explanation-2: -Before Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric theory, people generally agreed that the Moon and the Sun orbited the motionless Earth and that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were beyond the Sun in that order.

Detailed explanation-3: -Today virtually every child grows up learning that the earth orbits the sun. But four centuries ago, the idea of a heliocentric solar system was so controversial that the Catholic Church classified it as a heresy, and warned the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei to abandon it.

Detailed explanation-4: -Copernicus held that the Earth is another planet revolving around the fixed Sun once a year and turning on its axis once a day. But while Copernicus put the Sun at the center of the celestial spheres, he did not put it at the exact center of the universe, but near it.

Detailed explanation-5: -In a book called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (that was published as Copernicus lay on his deathbed), Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. Such a model is called a heliocentric system.