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Babylonian Cosmology

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People have had an innate curiosity about the world since the beginning of time. Many observations and discoveries have been made over the last several thousand years. Such observations include that the Sun slowly travels east during the year relative to the zodiac constellations, the stars do not appear to shift their positions, and the planets exhibit retrograde motion. The Mesopotamians developed the idea that the Earth and the heavens were a spatial whole, making references to the circumference of heaven and Earth and the totality of heaven and Earth. Babylonian cosmology suggested that the cosmos revolved in a circular motion with the heavens and the earth being equal and joined as a whole. This led Plato to develop a model placing Earth as a …show more content…
This was the first geocentric model, although Plato could not explain the retrograde motion of the planets in his model. Plato asked, “By the assumption of what uniform and orderly motions can the apparent motions of the planets be accounted for?” Eudoxus first attempted this with his geometrical model of each planet having four spheres: The sphere corresponding to the sphere of the fixed stars that rotated daily about the celestial equator with North and South poles, and the sphere of the ecliptic that has its poles on the sphere of the fixed stars motion that differs for every planet (one zodiacal month for the moon, one year for the sun, Mercury, and Venus, two years for Mars, twelve years for Jupiter, and thirty for Saturn), The next two spheres only pertain to the five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). The first sphere for the synodic period that has as its period the time it takes for the planet to return to the same phase and the second sphere is for the synodic period and rotates opposite to the first

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