Google celebrates Nicolaus Copernicus's 540th birthday, a Renaissance scholar and astronomer, with an animated heliocentric model doodle. Copernicus in his seminal work De revolutionibus orbium ...

In this series, The Week looks at the ideas and innovations that permanently changed the way we see the world. The heliocentric theory is the idea that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and ...

Did Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Newton make isolated discoveries, or did Islamic science contribute to their work on astronomy ...

These days, we are treated to glorious images of the cosmos through astrophotography and sophisticated three-dimensional visualizations of the universe. In the early centuries of astronomy, however, ...

Ibn-al-shatir's lunar model from which Copernicus is reported to have borrowed in composing his cosmological model. Credit: This work is in the public domain in the ...

This illustration of the large GRB ring, and the inferred underlying large-scale structure, shows what might be responsible for the pattern we've observed. However, this may not be a true structure, ...

It's Nicolaus Copernicus' 540th birthday, and Google marked the day with a lovely medieval model of the heliocentric solar system. Why? Because Copernicus was the first person to say what every ...

Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, beginning a life that would see the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer shake up theories that claimed the Earth was the center of the universe ...

Far back in 1508, with only limited tools at his disposal, Nicolaus Copernicus developed a celestial model of a heliocentric planetary system, which he described in his landmark work De revolutionibus ...

This chart, from around 1660, shows the signs of the zodiac and a model of the solar system with Earth at the centre. For decades or even centuries after Kepler clearly demonstrated that not only is ...