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Brahe,
Tycho Danish astronomer Born: Knudstrup (Sweden, then part of Denmark), December 14, 1546 Died: Prague, Czechoslovakia, October 24, 1601 |  | ||||||||
Brahe Galileo Herschel Hevelius Hubble Kepler Leavitt Messier Shapley |
Tycho Brahe is said to have been one of twins. His brother, however, was either stillborn or died soon after birth. In early life he studied law and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. He was all set to go into a life of politics, but after observing an eclipse of the sun in 1560, he switched to astronomy and mathematics. In 1572, he observed a bright new star in the sky, which was a supernova, and described it in a book entitled De Nova Stella, ("Concerning the New Star"). This star, named after Tycho, grew to be brighter than Venus and remained visible for eighteen months before fading away. This established the name "nova" for all exploding stars, made a reputation for the young astronomer and, since Tycho was able to show by parallax measurements that the star was much farther away than the moon, it struck a telling blow against the notions of Aristotle. The King of Denmark, Frederick II, was so impressed with his young subject that he subsidised the building of an astronomical observatory on the island of Hveen between Denmark and Sweden. It was the first real observatory in history and is estimated to have cost about two million dollars in todays money. Tycho observed a comet in 1577 and concluded that the cometary orbit was not circular, but rather elongated. He made further astronomical observations and was able to determine the length of a year to within a second, which led to the reform of the calendar under Pope Gregory XIII, leading to the "Gregorian calendar". Tycho went to Germany in 1597 after a fallout with the new Danish king Christian IV and there found a young German assistant named Kepler. Tycho gave Kepler his painstakingly gathered observations and set him to working on the preparation of tables of the planetary motions, before he died. | |||||||||
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