ocr: HELIOCENTRIC WORLD VIEW The Italian-French astronomer and the director of the Paris observ- atory, Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712), was the first to calculate the distance of the Sun with reasonable (7%) accuracy. He accomplished this by first defining the parallax of Mars. As a result of Cassini's calculations, the size of the Sun and the solar system grew nearly ten fimes. Along his calculations the distance of the Sun was in fact 20,000 times the radius of Earth, not 1,200 times as had been earlier thought. The size of the solar system grew on the same scale. Among other things Cos- s ...
