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
The House of the Rising Sun that the song is about a woman who killed her father, an alcoholic gambler who had beaten his wife. Therefore, the House of the Rising Sun may be a jailhouse, from which one would be the first person to see the sunrise (an idea supported by the lyric mentioning "a ball and chain," though that phrase has been slang for marital relationships for at least as long as the song has been in print). Because women often sang the song, another theory is that the House of the Rising Sun was where prostitutes were detained while being treated for syphilis.