How did we find out that the earth is part of the solar system?

Question

i need to do a astronomy booklet and cant find this answer anywhere.

PLEASE help!!!

Also-

Why do we think that the Earth is the only planet in the solar system that organisms can survive on?

and to:-

Find out three theories about how the universe is organised that are

different from the one we know to be true today

Please help!

Thanks, please can i juust have proper answers and no mucked up stuff!

Answer 1

Since ancient times, people knew about the planets - these bright objects that moved about in the sky, but it was the Polish astronomer Copernicus who first came up with the idea that planets were other worlds like our own, and that the planets and Earth all revolved around the sun. The idea was refined by Kepler and Galileo. Galileo famously got into trouble with the Catholic church for stating that the Earth revolves around the sun, because the church scholars believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

Earth may be the only planet in the solar system that supports life. The reasons we believe this are:

(1) The environment on most of the other planets is hostile to organic life forms (too hot, too cold, corrosive chemicals, etc.)

(2) Life has changed the atmosphere of Earth. For example, Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen to begin with, it was all created by plants. We do not see any evidence of biological changes in the atmospheres of other planets or moons.

By "organised" I take it you mean physically organised? How about:

Geocentric (Earth at centre)

Ionian model (cylindrical Earth)

Flat Earth (yes, some people actually still believe this!)

Answer 2

This is not true at this moment.

People who r into geonomy are  not sure abut Mars.

About other planets may other creatures or micro organs are there although extream hot or cold, but scientist are now only into Mars and nothing else.

Answer 3

Several scientist in the 1st Century were involved (doing research, etc., etc.) with how the "stars" differed from "other" stars (planets).  Then later a scientist named Copernicus postulated that the "stars" did, in fact, differ and that these particular "stars" (planets) actually revolved about the sun and not the earth (as biblical teachings observed).  The Earth was, in fact, one of these such planets ("stars"). He was a catholic, but didn't "suffer" about the "problem"; due to the fact that he didn't "publish" his findings till on his death bed!  Then later other scientists (Kepler, Gallaleo Galilei, etc., etc) did prove his assumption.  Gallaleo having made his telescope into a better model, by grinding his own lenses.  

The Earth has organic materials, ie, Oxygen, Water, Nitrogen etc.,etc., and is thought to be the only "planet" with this particular mixture of organics that are required for larger organisms to survive.  Therefore, the organics required are found on Earth, only and no other planet.  

The Universe is "organized" in such a way that causes our galaxy, The Milky Way, to be seen only in our sky.  Therefore, we on Earth, due to our intelligence, can see the "stars" and determine "things".  Therefore, our "intelligence" (# 1.) determines what we know, or theorize about.  (# 2.) A theory postulated by Carl Sagan states that: "We should be a people of a "two planet" society."  Because we, on Earth, are "plummeted" constantly by astroids and comets.  Therefore, we should move to another planet---the only other one that we could possible exist on is Mars---which is being investigated (there would need to be some of the same organics found on Earth for us to exist), even as we speak.  Getting there will be astronomical (pun intended), for gravity plays a major part.  And we don't, yet, know whether, or not, we could even exist (due to gravity) even on Mars---therefore, it could be yet another exoplanet (a planet about yet another star in another galaxy)----which we are looking for, even as we speak.  So far (# 3.)all we've "found" are "hot Jupiters" (These planets are so huge and so hot, no life, known, could exist on them), planets about a neutron star (being constantly plummeted by gamma rays), and exoplanets going about its star in a terrably excentric orbit, in such a way that they're constantly very hot, and also very cold.  So, we are still "looking", and it's taking a vast amount of time.

Answer 4

I get the impression you think the world revolves around you. Try and put that in your booklet : )

Answer 5

This was a product of us coming to realise how big the Universe is and how small a part of it we are.  In the Western European world view at least we thought of the stars and the planets that wandered among them (including the larger Moon and Sun) as lights on a spherical curtain circling above our heads.  The Earth was the centre of the Universe and all things circled around it.  Then we realised that things could be described better by envisaging that the planets and our Earth were circling around the Sun.  It was difficult to get the scale right but Kepler's Laws showed us how to work out the ratios of the sizes of the planetary orbits.  Eventually we came up with some neat tricks to convert the ratios into distances we knew about, except it began to dawn on us that the distances between the planets measured in the tens, hundreds and even thousands of millions of kilometers, obviously much bigger distances than we really could say we "knew" about.  The stars were obviously even further away as their positions remained nearly fixed in relation to each other in the sky.  Eventually our measuring instruments grew precise enough to detect the slight shifts in position of the nearest stars due to the Earth's annual motion around the Sun.  Even the nearest star turned out to be hundreds of thousands of times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.  As we improved our instruments and came up with other ways of estimating the distances to stars we realised that the Sun and its family was just one star in a grouping of billions of stars occupying a space ten to a hundred thousand times larger than the distance between the Sun and the next nearest star.  Even then we were guilty of thinking that that was all there was to the Universe but the quest to understand the various fuzzy patches of light visible in the sky through a telescope eventually lead to the realisation that these were also island universes of billions of stars drifting in a vast space.

Answer 6

not sure of the specifics, but someone watched the way the 5 originally known planets (mercury, venus, mars, jupiter and saturn) moved in they sky.... they didn't move like the other stars in the sky did, they kind of hard their own little spirals to them... from this he concluded that earth along with the 5 other planets were rotating around the sun.

until just recently, it was thought impossible liquid water could exist on any other planet in our solar system, which is one of the most vital building blocks to life as we know it.

Answer 7

Other scientists did research studying the solar system, but Galileo proved it. He would be a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo

He didn't invent the telescope, but he did make it better, stronger, and with calculations he proved the earth was going around the sun. 'Solar' = sun system.

For many years people noticed planets, but they didn't know what they were.

Nasa has rovers on Mars right now searching for life. The conditions on Mars are more harsh, it's very cold, but they have not ruled out that life is impossible there. Life is found just about everywhere on Earth so we may find it on Mars or Europa.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/life/...

As far as theories about how the universe is organized,

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Perhaps you'll find an answer with Dr Steven Hawking:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.ht...

Answer 8

Sian: for your first question, most of what you need is in Wikipedia, under Copernican Heliocentrism. The short answer is that we believe the Earth rotates around the Sun because it works out better with our observations of the sky.

Since the dawn of mankind, pretty much everybody assumed that the Earth was the center of the universe, because it just looks that way. The Earth appears to be stable, and the planets and the dome of heaven seem to rotate above our heads.

Astronomers -- and anyone who had even looked up into the sky -- had noticed that, at some times of the year, the planets tended to go backwards in loops, then start going forwards again. This is called retrograde motion. This doesn't make sense if everything was just orbitting the earth, and people tried to save the Earth-centric theory by suggesting that well, maybe the planets were inside crystal spheres that angels turned sometimes. But nobody could get this to exactly agree with precise observations.  

Copernicus was one of the first to suggest that the solar system had the sun at its center, and the earth and other planets revolved around the sun, and the moon revolved around the earth. He noticed that the need for crystal spheres just went away. If the planets were orbitting the sun at different speeds, sometimes they would seem to slow down and reverse direction relative to each other, and that more or less explains the whole thing.

This was a great theory because it was less complicated, but how to *prove* it? That took centuries. The three big events are listed in the Wikipedia article I referred to:

- Kepler, another astronomer, noticed that it worked out even better if you imagined the orbits of the planets to be elliptical (kind of a fatter circle). Copernicus had only imagined circular orbits, so his calculations were still a bit off.

- Using new and improved telescopes, Galileo noticed that Jupiter had moons, too small to see with the naked eye. This was the first time anyone could show that there was a heavenly body that was definitely not orbitting the Earth. He also showed that Venus was shining with reflected light from the Sun, and that the Sun had imperfections and rotated.

- Finally, when he was working out the laws of gravity, Newton figured out that the orbits of planets had to be elliptical, just as Kepler had suggested.

So, it's been a steady progress towards the truth, rather than one single thing that proved it.

Answer 9

1)  Aristarchus, and later, Copernicus, then Galileo all proposed the Heliocentric model of the Universe.  It was essentially correct for the Solar System, but not for the entire Universe.  The realization that the Sun is a star and that the stars are millions of times further away than the planets took many years.

2)  We are assuming that any form of life needs liquid water to develop and survive.  None of the other planets in the Solar System currently has liquid water.  It has just been found by the Phoenix Mars Lander that Mars has water ice, but not liquid water.

3)  There are more than three previous theories about the organization of the Universe if you consider the differences between each scientist's view:

Heraclides Model

Ptolemaic System

Copernican System

Brahe's System

Previous theories (models) of the Universe

Geocentric Model

The geocentric model of the universe is the theory that the Earth is at the center of the universe and the Sun and other objects go around it. Belief in this system was common in ancient Greece. It was embraced by both Aristotle and Ptolemy, and most Greek philosophers assumed that the Sun, Moon, stars, and naked eye planets circle the Earth. Similar ideas were held in ancient China.

In the Ptolemaic system, each planet is moved by five or more spheres: one sphere is its deferent. The deferent was a circle centered around a point halfway between the equant and the earth. Another sphere is the epicycle which is embedded in the deferent. The planet is embedded in the epicycle sphere. The deferent rotates around the Earth while the epicycle rotates within the deferent, causing the planet to move closer to and farther from Earth at different points in its orbit, and even to slow down, stop, and move backward (in retrograde motion). The epicycles of Venus and Mercury are always centered on a line between Earth and the Sun (Mercury being closer to Earth), which explains why they are always near it in the sky. The Ptolemaic order of spheres from Earth outward is:

Moon

Mercury

Venus

Sun

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Fixed Stars

Sphere of Prime Mover

The Greek Thales, who had successfully predicted the sun’s eclipse in 585 B.C., suggested that the sky was a huge bubble, inside of which the cylindrical Earth floating on the surface of water. The stars and planets were embedded in the bubble. His theory didn’t satisfy the scientific community of his time, which wanted to know how the Earth was supported.

In the 6th century BC, Anaximander proposed a cosmology with the Earth shaped like a section of a pillar (a cylinder), held aloft at the center of everything. The Sun, Moon, and planets were holes in invisible wheels surrounding the Earth; through the holes, humans could see concealed fire.

About the same time, the Pythagoreans thought that the Earth was a sphere (in accordance with observations of eclipses), but not at the center; they believed that it was in motion around an unseen fire. Later these views were combined, so most educated Greeks from the 4th century BC on thought that the Earth was a sphere at the center of the universe.

Heliocentric Model

The first person to present an argument for a heliocentric system, however, was Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 BC). Like Eratosthenes, Aristarchus calculated the size of the earth, and measured the size and distance of the Moon and Sun, in a treatise which has survived. From his estimates, he concluded that the Sun was six to seven times wider than the Earth and thus hundreds of times more voluminous.

The geocentric model held sway into the early modern age; from the late 16th century onward it was gradually replaced by the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.

Tycho Brahe favored a geocentric model because he could not see the parallax of the fixed stars. Tycho proved that the stars would have to be more than hundreds of times further away than the most distant known planet of the time, which was Saturn. But this parallax or retrograde motion of the stars is very small because the stars are actually much further away, so the parallax was not seen for more than 200 years after Tycho.   Bradley discovered the abberation of starlight, which is 30 times larger than the largest parallax, roughly one century after Tycho, and this firmly established that the Earth was moving around the Sun. The parallax of stars was finally seen another century later.

Copernican system

In 1543 the geocentric system met its first serious challenge with the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which posited that the Earth and the other planets instead revolved around the Sun. The geocentric system was still held for many years afterwards, as at the time the Copernican system did not offer better predictions than the geocentric system, and it posed problems for both natural philosophy and scripture.

With the invention of the telescope in 1609, observations made primarily by Galileo Galilei (such as that Jupiter has moons) called into question some of the tenets of geocentrism but did not seriously threaten it.



In December 1610, Galileo Galilei used his telescope to observe that Venus showed all phases, just like the Moon. This observation was incompatible with the Ptolemaic system, but was a natural consequence of the heliocentric system.

Heliocentrism is the theory that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. The word came from the Greek (Helios = sun and kentron = center). Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the earth at the center. (The distinction between the Solar System and the Universe was not clear until modern times, but extremely important relative to the controversy over cosmology and religion.) Although many early cosmologists such as Aristarchus speculated about the motion of the Earth around a stationary Sun, it was not until the 16th century that the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus presented a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system, which was later elaborated and expanded by Kepler and defended by Galileo, becoming the center of a major dispute.

Over time, however, the Catholic Church began to become more adamant about protecting the geocentric view.  Pope Urban VIII, who had approved the idea of Galileo's publishing a work on the two theories of the world, became hostile to Galileo.  Over time, the Catholic Church became the primary opposition to the Heliocentric view

The favored system had been that of Ptolemy, in which the Earth was the center of the universe and all celestial bodies orbited it. A geocentric compromise was available in the Tychonic system, in which the Sun orbited the Earth, while the planets orbited the Sun as in the Copernican model. The Jesuit astronomers in Rome were at first unreceptive to Tycho's system; the most prominent, Clavius, commented that Tycho was "confusing all of astronomy, because he wants to have Mars lower than the Sun." (Fantoli, 2003, p. 109) But as the controversy progressed and the Church took a harder line toward Copernican ideas after 1616, the Jesuits moved toward Tycho's teachings; after 1633, the use of this system was almost mandatory.  For advancing heliocentric theory Galileo was put under house arrest for the last several years of his life.

The realization that the heliocentric view was also not true in a strict sense was achieved in steps. That the Sun was not the center of the universe, but one of innumerable stars, was strongly advocated by the mystic Giordano Bruno; Galileo made the same point, but said very little on the matter, perhaps not wishing to incur the church's wrath. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the status of the Sun as merely one star among many became increasingly obvious. By the 20th century, even before the discovery that there are many galaxies, it was no longer an issue.

Newton’s universal law of gravitation was his most important contribution to the study of the solar system. With it he showed why the planets follow the orbits described by Kepler. For the first time astronomers were able to predit the positions of the planets and foretell eclipses, even centuries in the future. With Kepler and Newton, modern astronomy may truly be said to have arrived.

Answer 10

I think Galileo helped prove we were part of the Solar System. I know he said the solar system was heliocentric if that helps. At the time Galileo did this the majority of the scientific world believed in a geocentric solar system model, that is that the Earth was the centre of the solar system. This is one of the different theories.

Answer 11

Look up Galileo and his study with a telescope.

Also Google the space programs that involve space probes.

If you can get good information about Galileo that should help you with your second part to your question as he was jailed by the church for debunking their beliefs in the organization of the solar system.