Planetary system BC by Aristarchus of Samos, but received no support from most other ancient astronomers. "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" by Nicolaus Copernicus, published in 1543, was the first mathematically predictive heliocentric model of a planetary system. 17th-century successors Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton developed an understanding of physics which led to the gradual acceptance of the idea that the Earth moves round the Sun and that the planets are governed by the same physical laws that governed the Earth. In the 16th century the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, an early supporter of the Copernican theory that the Earth and
Myth of the flat Earth flat Earth. The widely circulated engraving of a man poking his head through the firmament surrounding the Earth to view the Empyrean, executed in the style of the 16th century, was published in Camille Flammarion's "L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire" (Paris, 1888, p. 163). The engraving illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the Earth and the heavens met". In its original form, the engraving included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century. In later publications, some of which claimed that the engraving dates to the 16th century, the