The Use of Hypotheses in Determining Distances in Our Planetary System

As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomers still struggled to provide exact values for distances within our planetary system. Triangulation, also called parallax in astronomy, was the only direct method available. It was too weak. Since antiquity, astronomers were only able to arrive at definite results by supplementing their analyses with hypotheses that in turn would require subsequent support. Early hypotheses failed to find this support. The heliocentric hypothesis of Copernicus succeeded.