Abyssal plains were not recognized as distinct physiographic features of the sea floor until the late 1940s and, until very recently, none had been studied on a systematic basis. They are poorly preserved in the sedimentary record, because they tend to be consumed by the subduction process.
The first man to discover that the earth moves around the sun was an Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei.
Johannes Kepler used Brahe's measurements to improve the heliocentric system Copernicus had proposed, showing that planets had elliptical orbits around the sun. When Isaac Newton applied the newly discovered universal theory of gravitation to the data, he used a heliocentric model.