By now, however, Galileo had been silenced by a pronouncement of the Holy Office, which had suspended Copernicus’s De revolutionibus in 1616, admitting the theory of the Earth’s mobility only as a mathematical hypothesis, not to be proclaimed as a natural truth, because contrary to Holy Scripture. The three comets that appeared between 16 gave rise to another heated argument, this time between Galileo and the Jesuit priest Orazio Grassi. In the following years, on the basis of observations and calculations aimed at the accurate calculation of the periods of the four satellites, Galileo created the jovilabe, an instrument that would have favored the use of the system of Jupiter as a perfect clock to solve the long-time problem of determining the longitude at sea. And it was not by chance that Galileo, who had long been seeking the protection of a prince in order to continue his studies without having to teach, named them the Medicean Stars, dedicating them to the House of Medici. Among all these discoveries, that of Jupiter's satellites was thus the one with the greatest impact. Once it had been demonstrated that this was by no means impossible, the same thing could be true of the Earth, which might very well revolve around the Sun, accompanied by its satellite the Moon. ![]() It soon became obvious that four satellites revolved around Jupiter and, contemporaneously with the planet, around the Sun, a phenomenon whose impossibility had always been viewed by the Ptolemaics (Aristotelians) as proof of an earth-centred system.
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