Abstract
The first ideas concerning the structure of the universe were only speculations based on the visual aspect of the sky. Demokritos (460–370 B.C), it is true, had already expressed the view that the stars would be suns of the same nature as our sun, and that the glittering band of the Milky Way consisted of small particles, but these views were not generally adopted. Copernicus and Kepler spoke only of a’ sphere of fixed stars’ — sphaera immobilis stellarum fixarum — whose diameter would be so large compared to the diameter of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, that no parallactic displacement of the stars caused by the yearly motion of the Earth could be observed.
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© 1971 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Kienle, H. (1971). Historical Development of Our Ideas Concerning the Structure of the Galaxy. In: Structure and Evolution of the Galaxy. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3075-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3075-5_1
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