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6 answers

By observing the other planets and their movement around the sun.

2007-01-30 18:35:19 · answer #1 · answered by Gordon K 2 · 0 0

I pulled this straight from the first website I listed as a source:

Copernicus made a great leap forward by realizing that the motions of the planets could be explained by placing the Sun at the center of the universe instead of Earth. Although the Greek astronomer Aristarchus developed the same hypothesis more than 1500 years earlier, Copernicus was the first person to argue its merits in modern times.

Despite the basic truth of his model, Copernicus did not prove that Earth moved around the Sun. The first direct evidence came from Newton’s laws of motion, which say that when objects orbit one another, the lighter object moves more than the heavier one. Because the Sun has about 330,000 times more mass than Earth, our planet must be doing almost all the moving. A direct observation of Earth’s motion came in 1838 when the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel measured the tiny displacement, or parallax, of a nearby star relative to the more distant stars. This minuscule displacement reflects our planet’s changing vantage point as we orbit the Sun during the year.

2007-01-30 19:05:06 · answer #2 · answered by Jay Sucro 1 · 1 0

The first clue was retrograde orbits, those times when the outer planets seem to reverse course in the sky for a few days or weeks. It happens when Earth passes them going around the Sun. (It was very hard to explain before we realized it's like passing another car on the highway and watching its motion relative to the landscape.) In fact, they tried very hard to compensate for the apparent contradictions with some very complicated celestial mechanisms. But when Galileo first trained a telescope on Jupiter and found moons orbiting around it, it became pretty obvious that putting the sun at the center was a simpler, better explanation for what they saw.

2007-01-30 18:45:04 · answer #3 · answered by skepsis 7 · 0 0

einsyine never was able to find out this fact during his lifetime and left a true vedic ashvinau that earth revolves around the sun

2007-01-30 18:52:45 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

Trigometry I think.

2007-01-30 18:42:41 · answer #5 · answered by Voodoid 7 · 0 0

by observation.....

2007-01-30 18:37:23 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

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