Nicolas Copernicus designed his model of the solar system

For almost two thousand years, the earth was believed to form the center of the solar system. However, in early 16^th century Nicolas Copernicus (an astronomer of the Polish origin) proposed a new perspective that, the earth was just a planet like any other and did not form the center of the solar system. He rather proposed that, the sun was the center of the solar system; he called his model the heliocentric system. His findings were written in a book called “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies” which was published after his death. This paper will give an in-depth analysis of the Copernican model, the Ptolemaic model, and then give a comparison between the two models.

Copernican model

Nicolas Copernicus designed his model of the solar system to achieve the greatest simplicity, within his physical and philosophical axiomatic framework. He sought to eliminate the unnecessary hypothesis of the Ancients concerning coincidences and correlations of planetary orbits by explaining these orbits in terms of his heliocentric approach. The Copernican model of the solar system consists of the central star sun surrounded by a family of planets in concentric circular orbits. Whether we accept Copernican model or the multi-star model of the solar system is a philosophical choice rather than a scientific decision. He came up with a new ordering of the solar system as illustrated in the figure below (Anon. “The Copernican Model”1)