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Understand Tycho Brahe's contributions to astronomy during the Scientific Revolution, his life on the Island of Hveen, his relationship with Kepler, and his mysterious death. Read the article here:
- Mark Bowles
- Overview
- Youth and education
Tycho Brahe lost his nose in 1566 in a duel with Manderup Parsberg, a fellow Danish student at the University of Rostock and his third cousin. Tycho wore a prosthetic nose made of brass, and afterward he and Parsberg became good friends.
What were Tycho Brahe’s accomplishments?
Tycho Brahe made accurate observations of the stars and planets. His study of the “new star” that appeared in 1572 showed that it was farther away than the Moon and was among the fixed stars, which were regarded as perfect and unchanging.
What was Tycho Brahe’s theory of the solar system?
Tycho Brahe proposed a theory of the solar system, which contained elements of both the Earth-centred Ptolemaic system and the Sun-centred Copernican system. In his theory, the other planets revolved around the Sun, which itself revolved around Earth.
Tycho Brahe (born December 14, 1546, Knudstrup, Scania, Denmark—died October 24, 1601, Prague) was a Danish astronomer whose work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars paved the way for future discoveries. His observations—the most accurate possible before the invention of the telescope—included a comprehensive study of the solar system and accurate positions of more than 777 fixed stars.
Tycho’s father was a privy councillor and later governor of the castle of Helsingborg, which controls the main waterway to the Baltic Sea. His wealthy and childless uncle abducted Tycho at a very early age and, after the initial parental shock was overcome, raised him at his castle in Tostrup, Scania, also financing the youth’s education, which began with the study of law at the University of Copenhagen in 1559–62.
Several important natural events turned Tycho from law to astronomy. The first was the total eclipse of the Sun predicted for August 21, 1560. Such a prediction seemed audacious and marvelous to a 14-year-old student, but when Tycho witnessed its realization he saw and believed—the spark was lit—and, as his many later references testify, he never forgot the event. His subsequent student life was divided between his daytime lectures on jurisprudence, in response to the wishes of his uncle, and his nighttime vigil of the stars. The professor of mathematics helped him with the only printed astronomical book available, the Almagest of Ptolemy, the astronomer of antiquity who described the geocentric conception of the cosmos. Other teachers helped him to construct small globes, on which star positions could be plotted, and compasses and cross-staffs, with which he could estimate the angular separation of stars.
In 1562 Tycho’s uncle sent him to the University of Leipzig, where he studied until 1565. Another significant event in Tycho’s life occurred in August 1563, when he made his first recorded observation, a conjunction, or overlapping, of Jupiter and Saturn. Almost immediately he found that the existing almanacs and ephemerides, which record stellar and planetary positions, were grossly inaccurate. The Copernican tables were several days off in predicting this event. In his youthful enthusiasm Tycho decided to devote his life to the accumulation of accurate observations of the heavens, in order to correct the existing tables.
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Between 1565 and 1570 (or 1572?) he traveled widely throughout Europe, studying at Wittenberg, Rostock, Basel, and Augsburg and acquiring mathematical and astronomical instruments, including a huge quadrant. In 1566 he lost his nose in a duel with Manderup Parsberg, his third cousin who was also a fellow student at Rostock. He and Parsberg became good friends afterward, but Tycho wore a prosthetic nose for the rest of his life. (His nose was long believed to be silver, but an exhumation of Tycho’s corpse in 2010 revealed that it was brass.)
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601, shown at left) was a nobleman from Denmark who made astronomy his life's work because he was so impressed when, as a boy, he saw an eclipse of the Sun take place at exactly the time it was predicted.
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Jan 1, 2002 · Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was the most important observational astronomer until the invention of the telescope in 1608. By construction new instruments and devising new observing methods, Tycho...
- Gudrun Wolfschmidt
Oct 16, 2023 · Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer most famous for charting the stars more accurately than ever before, first observing comets and a supernova, and forming a theory of the cosmos, which was a compromise between the models proposed by Ptolemy and Copernicus.
- Mark Cartwright
These two colorful characters made crucial contributions to our understanding of the universe: Tycho’s observations were accurate enough for Kepler to discover that the planets moved in elliptic orbits, and his other laws, which gave Newton the clues he needed to establish universal inverse-square gravitation.
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