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The telescope that Galileo built in the late 1500s had the magnifying power of a pair of inexpensive binoculars available in any Wal-Mart, but it was enough to open up a new world. With this simple instrument, Galileo could see that Jupiter has four moons and that the sun has spots, which led him to the conclusion that the sun was rotating. Most spectacular, he found that the planet Venus had phases--powerful evidence that the Copernican view of our solar system, in which the sun, rather than the earth, is at the center, was correct. As people built better telescopes, knowledge of this complex, beautiful new world of the cosmos evolved. We became aware of a vast universe ...