Who discovered the Solar System?
Anyone who looks up at the sky enough on clear nights can see seven bright objects. These are the Sun, our Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. People have known about them for a very long time. Ancient people thought they were related to gods. In Babylon, they named the days of the week after them. Almost everyone was sure that all these things were orbiting the Earth. They did not know we lived in a Solar System.In 1543, Nicholaus Copernicus figured out that the planets orbit the Sun. Only the Moon orbits the Earth. But he was afraid to say so for most of his life[4]. Then Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the sky. He found moons orbiting Jupiter. He was certain Copernicus was right, and he got in trouble for saying so. It took seventy years to convince scientists that the planets orbit the Sun.[5]. Now, almost everyone on Earth understands that we live in a Solar System.People made better telescopes and found more things in the sky – moons, new planets, and asteroid
