History of astronomy is itself a distant sun. During the renaissance period, astronomy began to undergo a revolution in thought known as the Copernican revolution, which gets the name from the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who proposed a heliocentric system, in which the planets revolved around the Sun and not the Earth. His De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was published in 1543. While in the long term this was a very controversial claim, in the very beginning it only brought minor controversy. The theory became the dominant view because many figures, most notably Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton championed and improved upon the
The War of the Worlds the 20th Century, including first contact and war between planets and their differing species. There were, however, stories of aliens and alien invasion prior to publication of "The War of the Worlds". In 1727 Jonathan Swift published "Gulliver's Travels". The tale included a people who are obsessed with mathematics and more advanced than Europeans scientifically. They populate a floating island fortress called Laputa, 4½ miles in diameter, which uses its shadow to prevent sun and rain from reaching earthly nations over which it travels, ensuring they will pay tribute to the Laputians. Voltaire's "Micromégas" (1752) includes two beings from Saturn