It was thought in ancient Greece that anything that wasn't a planet (wanderer, including the sun and moon) in the sky was fixed on a giant, hollow, rotating sphere. Conservatives persecuted anyone who disagreed. The three-dimensional nature of the universe later gained acceptance, but everyone assumed that it was all part of the same compact system with the sun at about the center of it all, even after Telescopes could spot galaxies outside our own. Conservatives persecuted anyone who disagreed. In the 20th Century, things started making more sense as individual stars in external galaxies were resolved and redshifts were measured to find recessional velocities of distant objects. After one final mumble in the scientific community that we may actually be at the rough center of the universe