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What orbital periods did Nicolaus Copernicus assign to Mercury and Venus?
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Nicolaus Copernicus
Portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus, 1580, from the Town Hall in ToruÅ, Poland; in the collection of Muzeum OkrÄgowe w Toruniu (Regional Museum in ToruÅ). In his book De revolutionibus, he proposed that the Sun was the center of the solar system and that the planets circle the Sun.
In his work Commentariolus, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model in which the sidereal periods of the planets increase with their distance from the Sun. Within this framework, he assigned the following orbital periods to Mercury and Venus:
- Mercury: 88 days1
- Venus: 225 days1