Billions and Billions of Reasons to Love Astronomy

Around 250 B.C., the greatest astronomer of the Alexandrian period, Aristarchus of Samos (c.310-230 B.C.),
postulated that in a circular orbit once a year, the sun and the fixed stars being stationary, the planets moving in circular orbits with the sun at the center, and the moon revolving around the Earth. Thus, in Aristarchus the heliocentric conception of the universe had reached its near completion formulation. No one until Copernicus more than 1750 years later described the celestial system as well and accurately as Aristarchus had done in his now lost treastise. (According to Plutarch, the head of the Stoic school of philosophy, Cleanthes, demanded that Aristarchus was indeed almost killed for his revolutionary thoughts).

Based upon these historical accounts, it is clear that a special chain of the Greek mathematician-astronomer-cosmologist philosophers consisting primarily of Philolaus, Heraclides, and Aristarchus had successively evolved a polemic concept of the universe which was in harmony with that of Copernicus over 1750 years later. Why is it then the the heliocentric concept of the universe with its spinning Earth did not evolve further after Aristarchus?
Why is it that the genuine knowledge of the celestial world had to be buried in the obscurity of the terrestial realm? Why is it that a theory so luminous had to remain in darkness and wait for centuries to be rediscovered?
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