According to Josep Puig , the Andalusian astronomer Ibn Bajjah proposed that the Milky Way was made up of many stars that almost touched one another and appeared to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublunary material , citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars on 500 AH ( 1106 / 1107 AD ) as evidence . Early European astronomers such as Tycho Brahe identified new stars in the night sky ( later termed novae ) , suggesting that the heavens was not immutable . In 1584 Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars was like the Sun , and may have other planets , possibly even Earth @-@ like , in orbit around them , an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers , Democritus and Epicurus , and by medieval Islamic cosmologists such as Fakhr al @-@ Din al @-@ Razi . By the following century , the idea of the stars being the same as the Sun was reaching a consensus among astronomers . To explain why these stars exerted no net gravitational pull on the Solar System , Isaac Newton suggested that the stars was equally distributed in every direction , an idea prompted by the theologian Richard Bentley .