Abstract
As we have seen, William Herschel’s first pioneering attempt at mapping the Milky Way resulted in a very irregular structure, with the Sun, and thus the Earth, approximately at its center. This new “Ptolemaic” vision of the universe was finally proven wrong by the work of Shapley, who showed, at the beginning of the 20th century, that the spherical distribution of the globular clusters located the gravitational center of the Galaxy far away from the Sun, once again demoting our place to its “Copernican-aware” non-special role.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bernardi, G., Vecchiato, A. (2019). Galaxies Everywhere!. In: Understanding Gaia. Springer Praxis Books(). Praxis, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11449-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11449-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Praxis, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11448-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11449-7
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)