Search BritannicaClick here to search

Subscribe
Login
HomeGames & QuizzesHistory & SocietyScience & TechBiographiesAnimals & NatureGeography &
TravelArts & CultureMoneyVideos
universe
Table of Contents

 Introduction
 Earliest conceptions of the universe
 Astronomical theories of the ancient Greeks
 The system of Aristotle and its impact on medieval thought
 The Copernican revolution
 Perceptions of the 20th century

References & Edit HistoryRelated Topics

Images & Videos
For Students

universe summary
Quizzes
Astronomy and Space Quiz

Space Odyssey

Stars: Explosions in Space

All About Astronomy
Related Questions

 What are the planets in the solar system?

 How did the solar system form?

 Why do stars tend to form in groups?

 Why do stars evolve?

Read Next

Was the Big Bang Actually an Explosion?

Why Is Pluto No Longer a Planet?

9 Britannica Articles That Explain the Meaning of Life

What's the Difference Between a Solstice and an Equinox?

A Model of the Cosmos

Discover
5 Remarkably Close U.S. Presidential Elections

Is "Holland" the Same Place as "the Netherlands"?

Riding Freedom: 10 Milestones in U.S. Civil Rights History

The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart

11 Memorable Quotes from U.S. Presidential Debates

Presidential Debate Bingo

How Many Electoral College Votes Does Each U.S. State Have?
ScienceAstronomy

universe
astronomy
Print Cite Share Feedback
Written by

Frank H. Shu
Fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jul 4, 2024 • Article History

Eratosthenes' method of measuring Earth's circumference

See all media
Key People:
 James Peebles

Democritus

Sir Fred Hoyle

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis

Saul Perlmutter
Related Topics:

star

eclipse

galaxy

Sun

gravity
See all related content →

Recent News
July 4, 2024, 1:46 AM ET (Earth.com)
Are humans the only intelligent life out there? Maybe, but not likely

Examine the observable universe's place within the whole universe

Learn about defining and measuring the observable universe within the “whole” universe.(more)
See all videos for this article
Universe, the whole cosmic system of matter and energy of which Earth, and therefore
the human race, is a part. Humanity has traveled a long road since societies imagined
Earth, the Sun, and the Moon as the main objects of creation, with the rest of the
universe being formed almost as an afterthought. Today it is known that Earth is only a
small ball of rock in a space of unimaginable vastness and that the birth of the solar
system was probably only one event among many that occurred against the backdrop of
an already mature universe. This humbling lesson has unveiled a remarkable fact, one
that endows the minutest particle in the universe with a rich and noble heritage: events
that occurred in the first few minutes of the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years
ago turn out to have had a profound influence on the birth, life, and death
of galaxies, stars, and planets. Indeed, a line can be drawn from the forging of the matter
of the universe in a primal “big bang” to the gathering on Earth of atoms versatile
enough to serve as the basis of life. The intrinsic harmony of such a worldview has great
philosophical and aesthetic appeal, and it may explain why public interest in the
universe has always endured.

The “observable universe” is the region of space that humans can actually or
theoretically observe with the aid of technology. It can be thought of as a bubble with
Earth at its centre. It is differentiated from the entirety of the universe, which is the
whole cosmic system of matter and energy, including the human race. Unlike the
observable universe, the universe is possibly infinite and without spatial edges.

Zoom out from Earth's solar system to the Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group, and beyond
Scale of the universe.
See all videos for this article
This article traces the development over time of humanity’s perception of the universe,
from prehistoric observations of the night sky to modern calculations on the recessional
velocity of galaxies. For articles on component parts of the universe, see solar
system, star, galaxy, and nebula. For an explanation of the scientific study of the
universe as a unified whole, see cosmology. For an article about the possible existence of
other universes, see multiverse.
Earliest conceptions of the universe
All scientific thinking on the nature of the universe can be traced to the distinctive
geometric patterns formed by the stars in the night sky. Even prehistoric people must
have noticed that, apart from a daily rotation (which is now understood to arise from the
spin of Earth), the stars did not seem to move with respect to one another: the stars
appear “fixed.” Early nomads found that knowledge of the constellations could guide
their travels, and they developed stories to help them remember the relative positions of
the stars in the night sky. These stories became the mythical tales that are part of
most cultures.

Britannica Quiz

Astronomy and Space Quiz

When nomads turned to farming, an intimate knowledge of the constellations served a

new function—an aid in timekeeping, in particular for keeping track of the seasons.
People had noticed very early that certain celestial objects did not remain stationary
relative to the “fixed” stars; instead, during the course of a year, they moved forward and
backward in a narrow strip of the sky that contained 12 constellations constituting the
signs of the zodiac. Seven such wanderers were known to the ancients: the Sun,
the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Foremost among the wanderers
was the Sun: day and night came with its rising and setting, and its motion through the
zodiac signaled the season to plant and the season to reap. Next in importance was the
Moon: its position correlated with the tides, and its shape changed intriguingly over the
course of a month. The Sun and Moon had the power of gods; why not then the other
wanderers? Thus probably arose the astrological belief that the positions of
the planets (from the Greek word planetes, “wanderers”) in the zodiac could influence
worldly events and even cause the rise and fall of kings. In homage to this
belief, Babylonian priests devised the week of seven days, whose names even in various
modern languages (for example, English, French, or Norwegian) can still easily be
traced to their origins in the seven planet-gods.
Astronomical theories of the ancient Greeks
Study how Ptolemy tried to use deferents and epicycles to explain retrograde motion
Ptolemy's theory of the solar system.
See all videos for this article
The apex in the description of planetary motions during classical antiquity was reached
with the Greeks, who were of course superb geometers. Like their predecessors, Greek
astronomers adopted the natural picture, from the point of view of an observer
on Earth, that Earth lay motionless at the centre of a rigidly rotating celestial sphere (to
which the stars were “fixed”), and that the complex to-and-fro wanderings of
the planets in the zodiac were to be described against this unchanging backdrop. They
developed an epicyclic model that would reproduce the observed planetary motions with
quite astonishing accuracy. The model invoked small circles on top of large circles, all
rotating at individual uniform speeds, and it culminated about 140 CE with the work
of Ptolemy, who introduced the ingenious artifact of displaced centres for the circles to
improve the empirical fit. Although the model was purely kinematic and did not attempt
to address the dynamical reasons for why the motions were as they were, it laid the
groundwork for the paradigm that nature is not capricious but possesses a regularity
and precision that can be discovered from experience and used to predict future events.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.Subscribe Now
The application of the methods of Euclidean geometry to planetary astronomy by the
Greeks led to other schools of thought as well. Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 490 BCE), for
example, argued that the world could be understood on rational principles (“all things
are numbers”); that it was made of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire; that Earth
was a sphere; and that the Moon shone by reflected light. In the 4th
century BCE Heracleides Ponticus, a follower of Pythagoras, taught that the spherical
Earth rotated freely in space and that Mercury and Venus revolved about the Sun. From
the different lengths of shadows cast in Syene and Alexandria at noon on the first day of
summer, Eratosthenes (c. 276–194 BCE) computed the radius of Earth to an accuracy
within 20 percent of the modern value. Starting with the size of Earth’s shadow cast on
the Moon during a lunar eclipse, Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 BCE) calculated the
linear size of the Moon relative to Earth. From its measured angular size, he then
obtained the distance to the Moon. He also proposed a clever scheme to measure the
size and distance of the Sun. Although flawed, the method did enable him to deduce that
the Sun is much larger than Earth. This deduction led Aristarchus to speculate that
Earth revolves about the Sun rather than the other way around.

Unfortunately, except for the conception that Earth is a sphere (inferred from Earth’s
shadow on the Moon always being circular during a lunar eclipse), these ideas failed to
gain general acceptance. The precise reasons remain unclear, but the growing
separation between the empirical and aesthetic branches of learning must have played a
major role. The unparalleled numerical accuracy achieved by the theory of epicyclic
motions for planetary motions lent great empirical validity to the Ptolemaic system.
Henceforth, such computational matters could be left to practical astronomers without
the necessity of having to ascertain the physical reality of the model. Instead, absolute
truth was to be sought through the Platonic ideal of pure thought. Even the
Pythagoreans fell into this trap; the depths to which they eventually sank may be judged
from the story that they discovered and then tried to conceal the fact that the square
root of 2 is an irrational number (i.e., cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers).

The system of Aristotle and its impact on

medieval thought
Examine Aristotle's model of the solar system and note its failure to explain phenomena like
retrograde motion
Aristotle's theory of the solar system.
See all videos for this article
The systematic application of pure reason to the explanation of natural phenomena
reached its extreme development with Aristotle (384–322 BCE), whose great system of
the world later came to be regarded as the synthesis of all worthwhile knowledge.
Aristotle argued that humans could not inhabit a moving and rotating Earth without
violating common sense perceptions. Moreover, in his theory of impetus, all terrestrial
motion, presumably including that of Earth itself, would grind to a halt without the
continued application of force. He took for granted the action of friction because he
would not allow the seminal idealization of a body moving through a void
(“nature abhors a vacuum”). Thus, Aristotle was misled into equating force
with velocity rather than, as Sir Isaac Newton was to show much later, with
(mass times) acceleration. Celestial objects were exempt from dynamical decay because
they moved in a higher stratum whereby a perfect sphere was the natural shape of
heavenly bodies and uniform rotation in circles was the natural state of their motion.
Indeed, primary motion was derived from the outermost sphere, the seat of the
unchangeable stars and of divine power. No further explanation was needed beyond
the aesthetic one. In this scheme, the imperfect motion of comets had to be postulated
as meteorological phenomena that took place within the imperfect atmosphere of Earth.

The great merit of Aristotle’s system was its internal logic, a grand attempt to unify all
branches of human knowledge within the scope of a single self-consistent
and comprehensive theory. Its great weakness was that its rigid arguments rested
almost entirely on aesthetic grounds; it lacked a mechanism by
which empirical knowledge gained from experimentation or observation could be used
to test, modify, or reject the fundamental principles underlying the theory. Aristotle’s
system had the underlying philosophical drive of modern science without its flexible
procedure of self-correction that allows the truth to be approached in a series of
successive approximations.

With the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE, much of what was known to the Greeks
was lost or forgotten—at least to Western civilizations. (Hindu astronomers still taught
that Earth was a sphere and that it rotated once daily.) The Aristotelian system,
however, resonated with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle
Ages, especially in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and later,
during the period of the Counter-Reformation in the 16th and early 17th century, it
ascended to the status of religious dogma. Thus did the notion of an Earth-centred
universe become gradually enmeshed in the politics of religion. Also welcome in an age
that insisted on a literal interpretation of the Scriptures was Aristotle’s view that the
living species of Earth were fixed for all time. What was not accepted was Aristotle’s
argument on logical grounds that the world was eternal, extending infinitely into the
past and the future even though it had finite spatial extent. For the church, there was
definitely a creation event, and infinity was reserved for God, not space or time.