It wasn’t until Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher and mystic, that anyone suggested that the sun was just one star among many, and the Earth one of many planets that orbited stars. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600, his tongue pierced by an iron spike and his jaw wired shut. His cosmological speculations were probably not the part of his heresy that the Church found most objectionable, but they didn’t help any.
