 Opposition to heliocentrism and Galileo 's writings combined religious and scientific objections and were fueled by political events . Scientific opposition came from Tycho Brahe and others , and arose from the fact that , if heliocentrism were true , an annual stellar parallax should be observed , though none was . Copernicus had correctly postulated that parallax was negligible because the stars were so distant . However , Brahe had countered that , since stars appeared to have measurable size , if the stars were that distant , they would be gigantic , and in fact far larger than the Sun or any other celestial body . In Brahe 's system , by contrast , the stars were a little more distant than Saturn , and the Sun and stars were comparable in size . 
