* Ancient Observations: People have observed planets and their movement in the sky for thousands of years. Ancient civilizations like the Greeks and Babylonians made detailed observations and developed models, even though they didn't fully understand the concept of heliocentricity (the sun being at the center).
* Nicolaus Copernicus (1543): Copernicus is credited with proposing the heliocentric model of the solar system, which stated that the planets revolve around the sun. However, he didn't have strong observational evidence to support his theory.
* Galileo Galilei (early 1600s): Galileo's observations with his telescope provided crucial evidence for the heliocentric model. He observed the phases of Venus, which could only be explained if Venus orbited the sun, not Earth.
* Johannes Kepler (early 1600s): Kepler developed laws of planetary motion, which described the elliptical orbits of planets around the sun. This provided a mathematical basis for the heliocentric model.
So, it's more accurate to say that the discovery of planets going around the sun was a process involving multiple individuals over centuries. Copernicus proposed the idea, Galileo provided observational evidence, and Kepler gave it mathematical foundation.
