page_title: Celestial spheres
section_title: Renaissance
hierarchical_section_title: Celestial spheres / History / Renaissance
caption_attribution_description: English: Thomas Digges map
context_page_description: The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element, like jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere.
  In modern thought, the orbits of the planets are viewed as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space. Ancient and medieval thinkers, however, considered the celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete contact with the sphere above it and the sphere below. When scholars applied Ptolemy's epicycles, they presumed that each planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them.
context_section_description: Early in the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus drastically reformed the model of astronomy by displacing the Earth from its central place in favour of the Sun, yet he called his great work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). Although Copernicus does not treat the physical nature of the spheres in detail, his few allusions make it clear that, like many of his predecessors, he accepted non-solid celestial spheres. Copernicus rejected the ninth and tenth spheres, placed the orb of the Moon around the Earth, and moved the Sun from its orb to the center of the universe. The planetary orbs circled the center of the universe in the following order: Mercury, Venus, the great orb containing the Earth and the orb of the Moon, then the orbs of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Finally he retained the eighth sphere of the stars, which he held to be stationary.
  The English almanac maker, Thomas Digges, delineated the spheres of the new cosmological system in his Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes … (1576).  Here he arranged the "orbes" in the new Copernican order, expanding one sphere to carry "the globe of mortalitye", the Earth, the four classical elements, and the Moon, and expanding the sphere of stars infinitely to encompass all the stars and also to serve as "the court of the Great God, the habitacle of the elect, and of the coelestiall angelles."
  In the sixteenth century, a number of philosophers, theologians, and astronomers—among them Francesco Patrizi, Andrea Cisalpino, Peter Ramus, Robert Bellarmine, Giordano Bruno, Jerónimo Muñoz, Michael Neander, Jean Pena, and Christoph Rothmann—abandoned the concept of celestial spheres. Rothmann argued from observations of the comet of 1585 that the lack of observed parallax indicated that the comet was beyond Saturn, while the absence of observed refraction indicated the celestial region was of the same material as air, hence there were no planetary spheres.
  Tycho Brahe's investigations of a series of comets from 1577 to 1585, aided by Rothmann's discussion of the comet of 1585 and Michael Maestlin's tabulated distances of the comet of 1577, which passed through the planetary orbs, led Tycho to conclude that "the structure of the heavens was very fluid and simple." Tycho opposed his view to that of "very many modern philosophers" who divided the heavens into "various orbs made of hard and impervious matter." Edward Grant found relatively few believers in hard celestial spheres before Copernicus and concluded that the idea first became common sometime between the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus in 1542 and Tycho Brahe's publication of his cometary research in 1588.
  In his early Mysterium Cosmographicum, Johannes Kepler considered the distances of the planets and the consequent gaps required between the planetary spheres implied by the Copernican system, which had been noted by his former teacher, Michael Maestlin. Kepler's Platonic cosmology filled the large gaps with the five Platonic polyhedra, which accounted for the spheres' measured astronomical distance.    In Kepler's mature celestial physics, the spheres were regarded as the purely geometric spatial regions containing each planetary orbit rather than as the rotating physical orbs of the earlier Aristotelian celestial physics. The eccentricity of each planet's orbit thereby defined the radii of the inner and outer limits of its celestial sphere and thus its thickness. In Kepler's celestial mechanics, the cause of planetary motion became the rotating Sun, itself rotated by its own motive soul. However, an immobile stellar sphere was a lasting remnant of physical celestial spheres in Kepler's cosmology.
caption: Thomas Digges' 1576 Copernican heliocentric model of the celestial orbs
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