Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus lived from 1473 AD to 1543 AD. A Polish cleric, he is considered the father of the Heliocentric Model of the Solar System.On his death bed, Copernicus is said to have received the first copy of his book "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). In this book he clearly lays out his hypothesis, that the Sun is the center of the Solar System. We refer to this theory today as the Heliocentric Model of the Solar System.Copernicus' Model suffered from the understandable assumption that the orbits of the planets around the Sun were all circles. Later work by the great Johannes Kepler showed that these orbits were in fact ellipses.It would be sixty years later that Copernicus' theory received renewed attention from both Kepler and his inestimable and brilliant contemporary, Galileo Galilei.