5,000BC The bible in the Old Testament said that God created the heavens & earth . People believed that the earth was fixed in space.

150 AD Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer, thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe. The sun, moon & stars travelled around the earth once each day. People thought this for over 1000 years.

1534 AD Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, thought the earth was a moving planet, spinning on its own axis daily and revolving around the sun. He couldn't prove his theory mathematically. Religious leaders banned his writings until 1757.

1610 AD Galileo, an Italian professor of mathematics. He studied the sky & agreed with the ideas of Copernicus.
In 1613 he wrote a letter showing that his ideas could fit in well with the Catholic Church. At the time there was an organisation of inquisitors who looked for people opposed to church teaching & punished them. Galileo was often sarcastic & had many enemies, some of whom sent his letter to the inquisitors. They found him not guilty of heresy (opposition to the Church teaching) but banned him from agreeing with Copernican theory.

1632 AD Galileo wrote a masterpiece, 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems'. This showed that Copernicus' theory was better. In 1633 he was found guilty of heresy & the Church made him publicly withdraw his statement and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He spent the rest of his life alone and unwell and eventually went blind.

1665 AD Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity helped to explain how the planets relate to each other and are pulled around the sun which is in the centre of the solar system.

2000 AD The Catholic Church officially declared that Galileo should not have been condemned in 1983. We have had satellites in space since the 1960s and the first man landed on the moon in 1966. Today telescopes can study the movement of this planet , the solar system and many other galaxies. We can photograph this and these theories are much easier to believe.