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16 The Birth of Modern Astronomy

Image of a statue of Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus holding model of Heliocentric Solar System.
Public Domain | Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

The Copernican Revolution was based on the works of four men — Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.

Nicolaus (or Nicolas) Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who believed there were too many errors in the Ptolemaic Geocentric Universe. Copernicus noted, as did some others, that Ptolemy’s “retrograde” was too complicated. So Copernicus developed a Sun-Centered Solar System, that is, a Heliocentric Solar System .

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