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Aristarchus of Samos (/ ˌ æ r ə ˈ s t ɑːr k ə s /; Ancient Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος ὁ Σάμιος, Aristarkhos ho Samios; c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day.
Aristarchus's 3rd century BCE calculations on the relative sizes of, from left, the Sun, Earth and Moon, from a 10th-century CE Greek copy. On the Sizes and Distances (of the Sun and Moon) (Ancient Greek: Περὶ μεγεθῶν καὶ ἀποστημάτων [ἡλίου καὶ σελήνης], romanized: Perì megethôn kaì apostēmátōn [hēlíou kaì selḗnēs]) is widely accepted ...
French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was the first to propose a model for the origin of the Solar System in his book The World, written from 1629 to 1633.. In his view, the universe was filled with vortices of swirling particles, and both the Sun and planets had condensed from a large vortex that had contracted, which he thought could explain the circular motion of the plane
Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the originators of the nebular hypothesis. Ideas concerning the origin and fate of the world date from the earliest known writings; however, for almost all of that time, there was no attempt to link such theories to the existence of a "Solar System", simply because it was not generally thought that the Solar System, in the sense we now understand it, existed.
The universe has appeared much the same as it does now, for many billions of years. It will continue to look similar for many more billions of years into the future. The galactic disk of the Milky Way is estimated to have been formed 8.8 ± 1.7 billion years ago but only the age of the Sun, 4.567 billion years, is known precisely. [82]
The Big Bang theory, which explains the Evolution of the Universe from a hot and dense state, is widely accepted by physicists.. In astronomy, cosmogony is the study of the origin of particular astrophysical objects or systems, and is most commonly used in reference to the origin of the universe, the Solar System, or the Earth–Moon system.
1785 – William Herschel proposes a heliocentric model of the universe that Earth's Sun is at or near the center of the universe, which at the time was assumed to only be the Milky Way Galaxy. [74] 1791 – Erasmus Darwin pens the first description of a cyclical expanding and contracting universe in his poem The Economy of Vegetation.
Philolaus (4th century BCE) was one of the first to hypothesize movement of the Earth, probably inspired by Pythagoras' theories about a spherical, moving globe. In the 3rd century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos proposed what was, so far as is known, the first serious model of a heliocentric Solar System, having developed some of Heraclides Ponticus' theories (speaking of a "revolution of the Earth ...