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The geocentric system of Ptolemy said that all the planets stay in their prescribed spheres. By that was meant that each planet has its own shell (a hollow sphere) that it stays inside. The sphere of Mercury is closest to the Earth, then Venus and then the Sun.

Galileo discovered the phases of Venus with his telescope. Now it's quite OK for Venus to have a crescent phase in the Ptolemaic system, because it can travel between the Earth and the Sun. But Galileo also saw that Venus had a gibbous phase at certain times, which the Ptolemaic system fails to account for.

Galileo said this was a serious fault with the Ptolemaic system (correct) but he then claimed incorrectly that this must prove that the Copernican system - with the Sun at the centre - is correct. Galileo was wrong about that because Tycho Brahe came up with an alternative model that had Mercury and Venus orbiting the Sun, but then the Sun and the other planets still orbited round the Earth. This was a geocentric system that correctly described all the phases of Venus.

But after the work of Kepler and Newton it was eventually agreed generally that the Sun has to be at the centre.

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