# data[].attributes.body
The first monument at Stonehenge was a circular earthwork enclosure, built in about 200 BC in Wiltshire, England. Enormous stones and smaller blue stones were raised to form a unique monument. It was used for many things and served as as a ceremonial site, a religious pilgrimage destination, a final resting place for royalty or a memorial erected to honor and perhaps spiritually connect with distant ancestors.  The cluster of megalithic stones operated as an astronomical calendar, with different points corresponding to astrological phenomena such as solstices, equinoxes and eclipses.

# data[].attributes.body
Born in 190 BC, Nicaea, he was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry but is most famous for his incidental discovery of precession of the equinoxes. He was the one of the first to correctly theorize that the earth orbited around the sun

# data[].attributes.body
He was born 100 AD in Alexandria, Egypt. He was an Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent. Ptolemy founded the Ptolemaic Model of the Solar System. The Ptolemaic system was a geocentric system that postulated that the apparently irregular paths of the Sun, Moon, and planets were actually a combination of several regular circular motions seen in perspective from a stationary Earth.

# data[].attributes.body
Born February 19, 1473 in  Torun, Poland, Polish astronomer who proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions that Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis. Also that very slow long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the precession of the equinoxes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nicolaus Copernicus proposed his theory that the revolved around in the 1500s, when most people believed that Earth was the center of the universe. Although his model wasn't completely correct, it formed a strong foundation for future scientists, such as Galileo, to build on and improve humanity's understanding of the motion of heavenly bodies.

Indeed, other astronomers built on Copernicus' work and proved that our planet is just one world orbiting one star in a vast cosmos loaded with both, and that we're far from the center of anything.
Countdown: The most famous astronomers of all time
Born on Feb. 19, 1473, in Toruń, Poland, Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus is the Latinized form of his name) traveled to to attend college, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Copernicus' father had died when the child was young, and his uncle became a leading figure in his life.

Copernicus' uncle wanted him to study the laws and regulations of the Catholic Church then return home to become a canon, a type of official in the Catholic Church.

However, while visiting several academic institutions, Copernicus spent most of his time studying mathematics and . While attending the University of Bologna, Copernicus lived and worked with astronomy professor Domenico Maria de Novara, doing research and helping him make observations of the heavens.

Due to his uncle's influence, Copernicus did become a canon in Warmia, in northern Poland, although he never took orders as a priest. He conducted his astronomical research in between his duties as canon, the Encyclopedia Britannica noted.

(Image credit: Public domain)

The Copernican model of the solar system

In Copernicus' lifetime, most believed that Earth held its place at the center of the universe. The sun, the , and all of the planets revolved around it.

One of the glaring mathematical problems with this model was that the planets, on occasion, would travel backward across the sky over several nights of observation. Astronomers called this retrograde motion. To account for it, the current model, based on the Greek astronomer and mathematician view, incorporated a number of circles within circles - epicycles - inside of a planet's path. Some planets required as many as seven circles, creating a cumbersome model many felt was too complicated to have naturally occurred.

In 1514, Copernicus distributed a handwritten book to his friends that set out his view of the universe. In it, he proposed that the center of the universe was not Earth, but that the sun lay near it. He also suggested that Earth's rotation accounted for the rise and setting of the sun, the movement of the stars, and that the cycle of seasons was caused by Earth's revolutions around it.

Finally, he (correctly) proposed that Earth's motion through space caused the retrograde motion of the planets across the night sky (planets sometimes move in the same directions as stars, slowly across the sky from night to night, but sometimes they move in the opposite, or retrograde, direction).

Copernicus finished the first manuscript of his book, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres") in 1532. In it, Copernicus established that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth. He laid out his model of the solar system and the path of the planets.

He didn't publish the book, however, until 1543, just two months before he died. He diplomatically dedicated the book to Pope Paul III. The church did not immediately condemn the book as heretical, perhaps because the printer added a note that said even though the book's theory was unusual, if it helped astronomers with their calculations, it didn't matter if it wasn't really true. It probably also helped that the subject was so difficult that only highly educated people could understand it. The Church did eventually ban the book in 1616, according to Physics Today.

The Catholic Church wasn't the only Christian faith to reject Copernicus' idea.

"When 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' was published in 1543, religious leader Martin Luther voiced his opposition to the heliocentric solar system model," says Biography.com. "His underling, Lutheran minister Andreas Osiander, quickly followed suit, saying of Copernicus, 'This fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down.'"

Copernicus died on May 24, 1543, of a stroke. He was 70.

(Image credit: Getty/Moment)

Where was Copernicus buried?

In 2008, researchers announced that a skull found in Frombork Cathedral did belong to the astronomer, according to The Guardian. By matching DNA from the skull to hairs found in books once owned by Copernicus, the scientists confirmed the identity of the astronomer. Polish police then used the skull to reconstruct how its owner might have looked.

Nature quotes the AFP as stating that the reconstruction "bore a striking resemblance to portraits of the young Copernicus."

In 2010, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before being reburied, his grave marked with a black granite tombstone decorated with a model of the solar system. The tomb marks both his scientific contribution and his service as church canon.

"Today's funeral has symbolic value in that it is a gesture of reconciliation between science and faith," Jacek Jezierski, a local bishop who encouraged the search for Copernicus, said according to the Associated Press. "Science and faith can be reconciled."

The unmarked grave was not linked to suspicions of heresy, as his ideas were only just being discussed and had yet to be forcefully condemned, according to Jack Repcheck, author of " C opernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began."

"Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork?" Repcheck said. "Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was not the iconic hero that he has become."

(Image credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Refining the work of Copernicus

Although Copernicus' model changed the layout of the universe, it still had its faults. For one thing, Copernicus held to the classical idea that the planets traveled in perfect circles. It wasn't until the 1600s that Johannes Kepler proposed the orbits were instead ellipses. As such, Copernicus' model featured the same epicycles that marred Ptolemy's work, although there were fewer.

Copernicus' ideas took nearly a hundred years to seriously take hold. When Galileo Galilei claimed in 1632 that Earth orbited the sun, building upon the Polish astronomer's work, he found himself under house arrest for committing heresy against the Catholic Church.

Despite this, the observations of the universe proved the two men correct in their understanding of the motion of celestial bodies. Today, we call the model of the solar system, in which the planets orbit the sun, a heliocentric or Copernican model.

"Sometimes Copernicus is honored as having substituted the old geocentric system with the new, heliocentric one, as having regarded the sun, instead of the Earth, as the unmoving center of the universe," Konrad Rudnicki, an astronomer and author of " The Cosmological Principles," wrote. "This view, while quite correct, does not render the actual significance of Copernicus's work."

According to Rudnicki, Copernicus went beyond simply creating a model of the solar system.

"All his work involved a new cosmological principle originated by him. It is today called the Genuine Copernican Cosmological Principle and says, 'The Universe as observed from any planet looks much the same,'" Rudnicki wrote.

So while Copernicus' model physically placed the sun at the center of the solar system, it also figuratively removed the focus from Earth, making it just another planet.

Additional resources

You can read the English translation of Copernicus' manuscript "De Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium" here. Check out the complete works of Nicholas Copernicus Complete in " On the Revolutions: Nicholas Copernicus Complete Works (Foundations of Natural History)". Also, discover the many artefacts at the British Museum regarding Nicolaus Copernicus, here.

Bibliography

Jack Repcheck, " Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began," Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Sheila Rabin, " Nicolaus Copernicus," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019.

Fred Hoyle, "The work of Nicolaus Copernicus," Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Volume 336, January 1974, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1974.0009.

Teresa Zielinska, "Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)," Distinguished Figures in Mechanism and Machine Science, History of Mechanism and Machine Science Volume 1, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6366-4_5

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nicolaus Copernicus Biography: Facts & Discoveries

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nicolaus Copernicus proposed his theory that the revolved around in the 1500s, when most people believed that Earth was the center of the universe . Although his model wasn't completely correct, it formed a strong foundation for future scientists, such as Galileo, to build on and improve humanity's understanding of the motion of heavenly bodies.

# data[].attributes.body
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaulti de Galilei was born February 15, 1564 in Pisa, Italy. An Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Using the telescope, he discovered the four most massive moons of Jupiter, now known as the Galilean moons: Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. He discovered the geography of the moon and sunspots on the sun.

# data[].attributes.body
Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is widely credited as the first person to patent a telescope in 1608. His device was able to magnify an image up to three times. A telescope is a tool that astronomers use to see faraway objects. Many astronomers have used telescopes to look out into and chart the stars.

# data[].attributes.body
Tycho Brahe was born on December 14, 1546 in Knutstorp Castle, Sweden. Brahe made the most accurate celestial observations of his time and challenged the prevailing belief in how the universe was organized. He created a comprehensive study of the solar system and accurate positions of more than 777 fixed stars. His work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars went on to pave the way for future discoveries.

# data[].attributes.body
Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt was a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution. He is best known for his 3 laws of planetary motion and many books.

# data[].attributes.body
Isaac was born in in Woolsthorpe Manor House, United Kingdom on January 4, 1643. He was an English physicist and mathematician, who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. He solved the mysteries of light and optics, formulated the three laws of motion, and derived from them the law of universal gravitation.

# data[].attributes.body
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Albert Einstein - Nobel Prize Winner & Physicist | Mini Bio | Biography

# data[].attributes.body
Stephen Hawking was born January 8, 1942 in Oxford, UK. He was a British scientist, professor and author who performed groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology, and whose books helped to make science accessible to everyone. His theory of exploding black holes drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He also worked with space-time singularities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Stephen Hawking: Questioning the universe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In keeping with the theme of TED2008, professor Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe -- How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? -- and discusses how we might go about answering them.