The most widely accepted scientific explanation for the formation of the Solar System is called the Solar

Nebular Model. According to this model, the entire Solar System formed around 4.5 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a small fraction of a giant molecular cloud, also known as a nebula.

Nicholas Copernicus (the Latin version of Kippering) was a Polish church official whose passion was astronomy, and who actually performed some observations. By that time, all sorts of corrections had to be made to fit the motion of the planets to Ptolemy's ideas.

Copernicus proposed an alternative theory--that the Earth was a planet orbiting the Sun, and that all planets moved in circles, one inside the other. Mercury and Venus had the smallest circles, smaller than that of the Earth, and therefore their position in the sky was always near the Sun's. That made it easy to estimate their distances from the Sun in terms of the Earth-Sun distance. Mars, Jupiter and

Saturn moved in bigger circles, and they moved more slowly, so that whenever the Earth overtook them, they seemed to move backwards. Copernicus was quite cautious in voicing his theory: not only did it deny that the Earth was the center of the universe, but it, too, did not fully describe the motion of the planets. Some corrections were still needed. Being associated with the church (as

practically all European scholars were in those days), Copernicus had to abide by a rigid discipline, and he therefore hedged his ideas and only published them at the end of his life. Because of his caution, many church scholars indeed viewed his theory as a possible alternative to Ptolemy's.

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