When Galileo got ahold of a little telescope ... no more than a kid's toy today ... he soon turned it towards the night sky. The story says that he was the first one to do that. Apparently everyone else who had these things used them to look at their neighbors' windows. Anyway, When Galileo looked at Jupiter, he saw four tiny dots. As he watched them night after night, he saw that the four dots always stayed with Jupiter, but got nearer and farther from it. He eventually realized that they were small bodies in orbit around Jupiter. And then ... because he was Galileo ... he made the big intellectual jump: He reasoned that if there were smaller bodies in orbit around Jupiter, then Jupiter and the other planets might also be in orbit around something, and not necessarily around the Earth. He understood this as evidence that the sun is the center of the solar system.
