Who was the first man discovered the solar system?
Question:
Answer:
Copernicus.
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The first guy to look up? Or maybe God?
The ancient Greeks knew of the planets out to saturn, but all except Aristarchus and his pals had no idea that they along with Earth were children of the sun.
It took Copernicus in 15th century to propose a sun-centered system, but he still thought that the planets revolved around the earth, but that the whole lot revolved around the sun.
It took Kepler in 16th century to come up with his orbital math and show that planets orbits the sun in elliptical orbits - up til then the church could not except that God would create them in anything but true circles.
Tycho Brahe in the same period worked out that the stars were very very much more distant than the planets. He was first to use parallax method.
When Tycho measured the positions of stars over 6 months period, he could find no change in their position, even though the Earth had moved nearly 200 million miles in its orbit in the meantime. That could only mean that the stars were impossibly far away insteag of stuck in a celestial sphere as was previously believed.
But it took another 300 years before astronomers had instruments that could measure the parallax of stars.
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