Aristotle's View Of Astronomy

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Before the sixteenth century, the common knowledge of astronomy was based off the Ptolemaic model which said the Earth was the center of the universe and everything, including the sun, planets, and the heavenly spheres rotated about its center. It made complete sense at the time because it did account for every planetary motion and it was what the church believed. Claudius Ptolemy came up with this model in about 100 AD for other works of Greek astronomers.
Notably, he assumed each planet moved in a sphere, or an epicycle, around a bigger sphere around the Earth, called a deferent. This demonstrated why retrograde motion appeared to happen. Stars moved on a different celestial sphere around other planetary spheres because that is what Aristotle …show more content…

The stars also do not rotate around the Earth, but because the Earth is spinning it makes it appear that way. He described retrograde motion by the Earth catching up to the planet and passing them once a year. A very simple explanation compared to the previous model. This was a more elegant model in his Copernicus’s eyes because of the simplicity and geometry he used. This model was very slow for the general public to gain acceptance of it. While he was alive, he would get ridiculed for such ridiculous ideas. It wasn’t for half a century before this would be seen as heresy in the church’s view when other astronomers began to adopt this …show more content…

He was taught under Brache in Prague. Kepler was a mathematician and calendar maker. Bache taught him because of how impressive his mathematical skills were. He was able to calculate the positions of the planets. In 1604, he discovered a new star, which was actually the Milky Way’s last supernova. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy) which launched his heliocentric view of the universe and the first two laws of planetary motion. The first being that planets move in an elliptical, not spherical, orbit with the Sun being one of the foci, or center point. The second law stated that the planets will rotate and why doing so cover equal area in equal time no matter where in the orbital it

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