Heliocentric Solar System

Ancient Hindus were first to suggest a heliocentric solar system.  They had even calculated the distance between Earth and Moon as 108 diameters of Moon and Earth and Sun as 108 diameters of Sun. These figures are very close to the modern day values. All these were stated several thousand years before the famous scientist Galileo postulated in the west that sun was the center of the planetary system and Earth was not flat, which was against the prevailing religious doctrines and he died during his house-arrest by clergy. Another astonishing invention was ancient Hindus calculated the age of Earth as 4.3 billion years. The modern estimate is 4.5 billion years. Just remember that the biblical age of the Earth, as per Christians, is just 6,000 years!.

Rigveda 10.149.1

"The sun has tied Earth and other planets through attraction and moves them around itself as if a trainer moves newly trained horses around itself holding their reins."

Rig Veda 1.164.13

“Sun moves in its orbit which itself is moving. Earth and other bodies move around sun due to force of attraction, because sun is heavier than them.


Rig Veda 1.35.9

“The sun moves in its own orbit but holding earth and other heavenly bodies in a manner that they do not collide with each other through force of attraction.

Yajur-veda 6.21 " Through astronomy, geography, and geology, go thou to all the different countries of the world under the sun. Mayest thou attain through good preaching to statesmanship and artisanship, through medical science obtain knowledge of all medicinal plants, through hydrostatics learn the different uses of water, through electricity understand the working of ever lustrous lightening. Carry out my instructions willingly." 

Aitareya Brahmana(3.44) declares: 

“The Sun does never set nor rise. When people think the Sun is setting (it is not so). For after having arrived at the end of the day it makes itself produce two opposite effects, making night to what is below and day to what is on the other side…Having reached the end of the night, it makes itself produce two opposite effects, making day to what is below and night to what is on the other side. In fact, the Sun never sets….”

 Rig Veda goes: " In the prescribed daily prayers to the Sun we find..the Sun is at the center of the solar system. ..The student ask, "What is the nature of the entity that holds the Earth? The teacher answers, "Rishi Vatsa holds the view that the Earth is held in space by the Sun."

 An ancient Sanskrit couplet also contemplates the idea of multiple suns: 

"Sarva Dishanaam, Suryaham Suryaha, Surya." 

Roughly translated this means, "There are suns in all directions, the night sky being full of them," suggesting that early sky watchers may have realized that the visible stars are similar in kind to the sun. A hymn of the Rig Veda, the Taittriya Brahmana, extols, nakshatravidya (nakshatra means stars; vidya, knowledge)."

"Two thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center. "

One frequently encounters the concepts of the Sun being at the center of the solar system (cf Markandeya Purana, 106. 41). All this pales, however, before the concept, startlingly similar to the twentieth-century model, of an oscillating universe, or more accurately, a universe being cyclically created and destroyed, with just about the right time period of about 10,000 million years. 

( Mahabharata Santi Parva, or Markandeya Purana, 81, 57-58).  

The Rig Veda repeatedly asks, "How is it that though the Sun is not bound and is directed downwards, it does not fall?" A question asked by Isaac Newton more than three thousand years later, and no one else, because the Greeks had furnished the crystal spheres to which these objects were attached!

Aryabhata (476–550), in his magnum opus Aryabhatiya (499), propounded a planetary model in which the Earth was taken to be spinning on its axis and the periods of the planets were given with respect to the Sun. He accurately calculated many astronomical constants, such as the periods of the planets, times of the solar and lunar eclipses, and the instantaneous motion of the Moon. Early followers of Aryabhata's model included Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, and Bhaskara II.

 Aryabhata advocated an astronomical model in which the Earth turns on its own axis. His model also gave corrections (the śīgra anomaly) for the speeds of the planets in the sky in terms of the mean speed of the sun. Thus, it has been suggested that Aryabhata's calculations were based on an underlying heliocentric model, in which the planets orbit the Sun.

The Indian astronomers went even further, giving a physical reason for how the dual star or binary motion might allow the rise and fall of human consciousness to occur. They said that the Sun (with the Earth and other planets) traveled along its set orbital path with its companion start, it would cyclically move close to, then away from, a point in space referred to as Vishnunabhi, a supposed magnetic center or "grand center".