Aristarchus Updates Anaxagoras

This Ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician built upon the suppositions of his predecessor creating a heliocentric model of the universe with the earth, moon and planets orbiting the Sun during the 3rd century BCE. Using an observation from Anaxagoras about the cause of eclipses, some geometry and some clever thinking, he devised a method of determining the size of the sun and moon and even took a stab at understanding their distances to the earth. His work would be built on further by Eratosthenes a century later.

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