2-991-294 - Heritage Imagined/Heritage Images

AI IMAGE - Portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus, early 16th century, (2023). Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Polish Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon. He formulated the heliocentric theory, a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its centre. This discovery revolutionised scientific understanding of the Sun, stars and planets. In 1616, the Catholic church banned his book "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543. It would take another 200 years for the church to accept that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth.