Modern Day Astronomy Essay

Astronomy is a field of science that to this day we still do not completely understand. The cosmos is so vast it is difficult to imagine how small and irrelevant we actually are. There are countless objects and phenomenons that are yet to be discovered in the vast cosmos. Before Nicolaus Copernicus, most scholars believed the principles of the Greeks that placed the Earth at the center of the universe. It was not until the early 1600’s that astronomers began to accept the heliocentric theory. Unfortunately, the church was the main cause of this not being widely accepted because they felt it contradicted the word of God. Copernicus is the father of modern day Astronomy; he took a system from where we wanted to believe certain things to a system

When he finished this he only talked about it to his closest friends. “His first heliocentric writing was his Commentariolus. It was a small manuscript that was circulated but never printed. We do not know when he wrote this, but a professor in Cracow cataloged his books in 1514 and made reference to a ‘manuscript of six leaves expounding the theory of an author who asserts that the earth moves while the sun stands still’” (Rabin). This idea and this book literally changed the world. It made the Earth a planet and placed our Sun in the center. Without this theory, we do not push forward to understanding the physics of the universe. The Church felt that if God created the Earth and man in his own image then we must be the center of everything. Naturally, with this assumption, they rejected Copernicus’ idea and it delayed the acceptance of it. Copernicus feared religious reprisal and didn’t publish his book until he was on his death bed. “Copernicus' ideas, published only two months before he died, took nearly a hundred years to seriously take hold. When Galileo Galilei claimed in 1632 that Earth orbited the sun, building upon the Polish astronomer's work, he found himself under house arrest for committing heresy against the Catholic church” (Redd). Unfortunately throughout history and even in some cases today, religious beliefs slow down progress in science. An example of this today

For the time, this was another huge leap forward for astronomy and science. This gives us an explanation of why our weather seasons change, the rising and setting of the sun, and why the stars in the night sky move. Copernicus stating that the moon revolved around the earth also led to the explanation of the rise and fall of tides in the oceans on our planet. This helps explain and predict weather patterns today and even the exact time when the sun will rise and fall. We are able to do so many things today because of Copernicus’