De revolutionibus orbium coelestium  

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De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), first printed in 1543 in Nuremberg, is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The book offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times.

Summary

Copernicus offered seven postulates:

  1. Celestial bodies do not all revolve around a single point
  2. The centre of Earth is the centre of the lunar sphere—the orbit of the moon around Earth
  3. All the spheres rotate around the Sun, which is near the centre of the Universe
  4. The distance between Earth and the Sun is an insignificant fraction of the distance from Earth and Sun to the stars, so parallax is not observed in the stars
  5. The stars are immovable; their apparent daily motion is caused by the daily rotation of Earth
  6. Earth is moved in a sphere around the Sun, causing the apparent annual migration of the Sun; Earth has more than one motion
  7. Earth’s orbital motion around the Sun causes the seeming reverse in direction of the motions of the planets.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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