It sometimes seems like Galileo gets all the credit. He created the first telescopes used for astronomical observation. He was the first to describe the bumps on the surface of the Moon; he recognized that the Milky Way consisted of an array of distant stars; he discovered the satellites of Jupiter as well as the Sun’s spots; and he determined that Earth moves around the Sun.
Wrong . . . on the last point.
Galileo merely observed what Johannes Kepler had already proved: The universe does not revolve around Earth. It was Kepler—sickly, brilliant Kepler, plagued by a nagging wife and the deaths of several children—who figured out planetary place and motion in his head, without the help of any optical instrument.
Born in Germany in 1571, Kepler loved astronomy and mathematics from childhood. Despite being surrounded by a general public that could not abandon the religious doctrine of a fixed Earth, he grew up believing that the Polish astronomer Copernicus’s observation was correct: The planets orbit the Sun, not Earth.
Kepler’s three laws of motion made clear the structure and scale of the solar system.
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