Aristarchus thus believed the stars to be very far away, and saw this as the reason why there was no visible parallax, that is, an observed movement of the stars relative to each other as the Earth moved around the Sun. The stars are in fact much farther away than was generally assumed in ancient times, which is why stellar parallax is only detectable with telescopes. The rejection of the heliocentric view was apparently quite strong, as the following passage from Plutarch suggests ("On the apparent face in the orb of the Moon"):