Interestingly, the idea about stars as suns was known in antiquity in 3BC, before Ptolemy:
“Aristarchus suspected the stars were other suns[5] that are very far away, and that in consequence there was no observable parallax, that is, a movement of the stars relative to each other as the Earth moves around the Sun. Since stellar parallax is only detectable with telescopes, his accurate speculation was unprovable at the time.”
and
“Ptolemy planetary hypotheses were sufficiently real that the distances of the Moon, Sun, planets and stars could be determined by treating orbits’ celestial spheres as contiguous realities. This made the stars’ distance less than 20 Astronomical Units,[6] a regression, since Aristarchus of Samos’s heliocentric scheme had centuries earlier necessarily placed the stars at least two orders of magnitude more distant.”
Ptolemy system gave better predictions and also was better supported by observations, intuition and even thought experiments (about wind).
Interestingly, the idea about stars as suns was known in antiquity in 3BC, before Ptolemy:
“Aristarchus suspected the stars were other suns[5] that are very far away, and that in consequence there was no observable parallax, that is, a movement of the stars relative to each other as the Earth moves around the Sun. Since stellar parallax is only detectable with telescopes, his accurate speculation was unprovable at the time.”
and
“Ptolemy planetary hypotheses were sufficiently real that the distances of the Moon, Sun, planets and stars could be determined by treating orbits’ celestial spheres as contiguous realities. This made the stars’ distance less than 20 Astronomical Units,[6] a regression, since Aristarchus of Samos’s heliocentric scheme had centuries earlier necessarily placed the stars at least two orders of magnitude more distant.”
Ptolemy system gave better predictions and also was better supported by observations, intuition and even thought experiments (about wind).