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Some intellectuals and others accepted it as explaining things like planets going retrograde (appearing to move backwards in their orbits). The Catholic Church was not fond of it; they followed Ptolemy's teaching that the Earth was the center of all things, and explained that humanity was likewise at the center of God's thoughts. The idea of a different center to things upset their worldview. (During the Twentieth Century, the Church apologized for its earlier treatment of Copernicus, Galileo, and other discoverers.)

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βˆ™ 14y ago
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βˆ™ 11y ago

The heliocentric theory was used by Kepler at the start of the 1600s when he used measurements of the planets' positions made by Tycho Brahe to discover that the planets all move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus of each ellipse.

This contradicted the scriptures according to the Catholic Church, which at that time maintained that the Earth is at the centre of universe, but they still allowed the heliocentric theory to be taught as a theory in universities by Galileo among others. But Galileo went further and said the Sun in fact isat the centre, and wrote a book which portrayed the Pope as a simpleton. When he was put in court for heresy he could produce no proof and eventually recanted.

More than a century later there was proof of the heliocentric theory, when science had advanced to the point where it was possible to calculate the masses of the Sun and planets, and it was realised that the Sun is so massive there are no forces that can move it more than a very small amount, therefore it must be at the centre.

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