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Aristarchus of Samos
Aristarchus of Samos
Aristarchus of Samos
Contents [hide]
1 Heliocentrism
2 Distance to the Sun (lunar dichotomy)
3 See also
4 Notes
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
Heliocentrism[edit]
See also Heliocentrism
The original text has been lost, but a reference in Archimedes's book The Sand
Reckoner (Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli) describes a work by
Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model as an alternative
hypothesis to geocentrism. Thomas Heath gives the following English translation of
Archimedes' text[3]
You are now aware ['you' being King Gelon] that the universe is the name given by
most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth,
while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and
the centre of the earth. This is the common account (t? ??af?e?a) as you have
heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of
certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made,
that the universe is many times greater than the universe just mentioned. His
hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth
revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the
middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the
same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth
to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre
of the sphere bears to its surface.
The heliocentric theory was revived by Copernicus,[11] after which Johannes Kepler
described planetary motions with greater accuracy with his three laws. Isaac Newton
later gave a theoretical explanation based on laws of gravitational attraction and
dynamics.
Aristarchus claimed that at half moon (first or last quarter moon), the angle
between the Sun and Moon was 87.[13] He might have proposed 87 as a lower bound,
since gauging the lunar terminator's deviation from linearity to one degree of
accuracy is beyond the unaided human ocular limit (with that limit being about
three degrees of accuracy). Aristarchus is known to have also studied light and
vision.[14]