Heliocentrism was well known, the issue was that the copernican model was a bad model for the evidence and knowledge of physics available at the time (it was basically equivilent to a geocentric model but less need more epicycles, not less, and also required that the earth rotated and some unusual properties for stars). It took Kepler figuring out ellipses and slowly beating out epicycles as a way to do the math, as well as some other experiments which established the world did indeed rotate (not for lack of trying by heliocentricism advocates, but it's a hard measurement to make), to bring the idea mainstream. (And arguably only Newton's laws of motion actually tied it all together)