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For millennia, what today is known to be the Solar System was regarded as the contents of the "whole universe", so advances in the knowledge of both mostly paralleled. Clear distinction was not made until circa mid-17th century. See Timeline of Solar System astronomy for further details on this side.
Earlier, in 1917, Albert Einstein had found that his newly developed theory of general relativity indicated that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. Unable to believe what his own equations were telling him, Einstein introduced a cosmological constant (a " fudge factor ") to the equations to avoid this "problem".
French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes was the first to propose a model for the origin of the Solar System in his book The World, written from 1629 to 1633.. In his view, the universe was filled with vortices of swirling particles, and both the Sun and planets had condensed from a large vortex that had contracted, which he thought could explain the circular motion of the plane
The results of his observations of Mars and Saturn in this period, and especially a series of four observations of the Sun made in 1515, led to the discovery of the variability of Earth's eccentricity and of the movement of the solar apogee in relation to the fixed stars, which in 1515–1519 prompted his first revisions of certain assumptions ...
The first step toward a theory of Solar System formation and evolution was the general acceptance of heliocentrism, which placed the Sun at the centre of the system and the Earth in orbit around it. This concept had been developed for millennia ( Aristarchus of Samos had suggested it as early as 250 BC), but was not widely accepted until the ...
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's metaphysical Omega Point theory, found in his book The Phenomenon of Man (1955), [181] describes the gradual development of the universe from subatomic particles to human society, which he viewed as its final stage and goal, a form of orthogenesis.
In reality, Copernicus' system did not predict the planets' positions any better than the Ptolemaic system. [87] This theory resolved the issue of planetary retrograde motion by arguing that such motion was only perceived and apparent, rather than real: it was a parallax effect, as an object that one is passing seems to move backwards against ...
Historical models of the Solar System; History of astronomy; Timeline of cosmological theories; The number of currently known, or observed, objects of the Solar System are in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them are listed in the following articles: List of Solar System objects; List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System