History of the center of the Universe Sun at the center of our Solar System. The word comes from the Greek ( "helios" "sun" and "kentron" "center"). The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BCE by Aristarchus of Samos, but had received no support from most other ancient astronomers. Nicolaus Copernicus' major theory of a heliocentric model was published in "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres"), in 1543, the year of his death, though he had formulated the theory several decades earlier. Copernicus' ideas were not immediately accepted, but they did
History of the center of the Universe the Sun" from the centre of gravity of the solar system. For Newton, it was not precisely the centre of the Sun or any other body that could be considered at rest, but rather "the common centre of gravity of the Earth, the Sun and all the Planets is to be esteem'd the Centre of the World", and this centre of gravity "either is at rest or moves uniformly forward in a right line" (Newton adopted the "at rest" alternative in view of common consent that the centre, wherever it was, was at rest). Before the 1920s, it was generally