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Tycho Brahe

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Astronomers and
physicists

   Monument of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler in Prague
   Enlarge
   Monument of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler in Prague

   Tycho Brahe  [tˢyko ˈb̥ʁɑːɑ], born Tyge Ottesen Brahe [ˈtˢyːy ˈʌd̥əsn̩
   ˈb̥ʁɑːʊ] ( December 14, 1546 – October 24, 1601), was a Danish
   (Scanian) nobleman best known today as an early astronomer, though in
   his lifetime he was also well known as an astrologer and alchemist.

   He was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build
   the Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large
   astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements. As an
   astronomer, Tycho worked to combine what he saw as the geometrical
   benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical benefits of
   the Ptolemaic system into his own model of the universe, the Tychonic
   system. From 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes
   Kepler, who would later use Tycho's astronomical information to develop
   his own theories of astronomy. He is universally referred to as "Tycho"
   rather than by his surname "Brahe", as was common in Scandinavia.

   He is credited with the most accurate astronomical observations of his
   time, and the data were used by his assistant Kepler to derive the laws
   of planetary motion. No one before Tycho had attempted to make so many
   redundant observations, and the mathematical tools to take advantage of
   them had not yet been developed. He did what others before him were
   unable or unwilling to do — to catalogue the planets and stars with
   enough accuracy so as to determine whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican
   system was more valid in describing the heavens.

Life

Early years

   Tycho Brahe was born Tyge Ottesen Brahe (de Knutstorp), adopting the
   Latinised form Tycho at around age fifteen (sometimes written Tÿcho).
   He is often misnamed Tycho de Brahe. He was born at his family's
   ancestral seat of Knutstorp Castle, Denmark to Otte Brahe and Beate
   Bille. His twin brother died before being baptized. (Tycho wrote a
   Latin ode (Wittendorf 1994, p. 68) to his dead twin which was printed
   as his first publication in 1572). He also had two sisters, one older (
   Kirstine Brahe) and one younger ( Sophia Brahe). Otte Brahe, Tycho's
   father, was a nobleman and an important figure in the Danish King's
   court. His mother, Beate Bille, also came from an important family that
   had produced leading churchmen and politicians. In his youth he lived
   at Hvedborg Manor, Funen, Denmark with his uncle and attended Horne
   Church in nearby Horne.

   Tycho later wrote that when he was around two, his uncle, Danish
   nobleman Jørgen Brahe, "... without the knowledge of my parents took me
   away with him while I was in my earliest youth." Apparently this did
   not lead to any disputes nor did his parents attempt to get him back.
   Tycho lived with his childless uncle and aunt, Jørgen Brahe and Inger
   Oxe, in the Tostrup Castle until he was six years old. Around 1552 his
   uncle was given the command of Vordingborg Castle to which they moved,
   and where Tycho began a Latin education until he was 12 years old.

   On April 19, 1559, Tycho began his studies at the University of
   Copenhagen. There, following the wishes of his uncle, he studied law
   but also studied a variety of other subjects and became interested in
   astronomy. It was, however, the eclipse which occurred on August 21,
   1560, particularly the fact that it had been predicted, that so
   impressed him that he began to make his own studies of astronomy helped
   by some of the professors. He purchased an ephemeris and books such as
   Sacrobosco's Tractatus de Sphaera, Apianus's Cosmographia seu
   descriptio totius orbis and Regiomontanus's De triangulis omnimodis.

     I've studied all available charts of the planets and stars and none
     of them match the others. There are just as many measurements and
     methods as there are astronomers and all of them disagree. What's
     needed is a long term project with the aim of mapping the heavens
     conducted from a single location over a period of several years. —
     Tycho Brahe, 1563 (age 17).

   Tycho realized that progress in the science of astronomy could be
   achieved not by occasional haphazard observations, but only by
   systematic and rigorous observation, night after night, and by using
   instruments of the highest accuracy obtainable. He was able to improve
   and enlarge the existing instruments, and construct entirely new ones.
   Tycho's naked eye measurements of planetary parallax were accurate to
   the arcminute. His sister, Sophia, assisted Tycho in many of his
   measurements. These jealously guarded measurements became the
   possessions of Kepler following his death. Tycho was the last major
   astronomer to work without the aid of a telescope, soon to be turned
   toward the sky by Galileo.

   While a student, Tycho lost part of his nose in a duel with rapiers
   with Manderup Parsbjerg, a fellow Danish nobleman. This occurred in the
   Christmas season of 1566, after a fair amount of drinking, while the
   just turned 20-year-old Tycho was studying at the University of Rostock
   in Germany. Attending a dance at a professor's house, he quarrelled
   with Parsbjerg. A subsequent duel (in the dark) resulted in Tycho
   losing the bridge of his nose. A consequence of this was that Tycho
   developed an interest in medicine and alchemy. For the rest of his
   life, he was said to have worn a replacement made of silver and gold
   blended into a flesh tone, and used an adhesive balm to keep it
   attached. However, in 1901 Tycho's tomb was opened and his remains were
   examined by medical experts. The nasal opening of the skull was rimmed
   with green, a sign of exposure to copper, not silver or gold. Some
   historians have speculated that he wore a number of different
   prosthetics for different occasions, noting that a copper nose would
   have been more comfortable and less heavy than one of precious metals.

Death of his father

   His foster father, uncle Jørgen Brahe, died in 1565 of pneumonia after
   rescuing Frederick II of Denmark from drowning. In April 1567, Tycho
   returned home from his travels and his father wanted him to take up
   law, but Tycho was allowed to make trips to Rostock, then on to
   Augsburg (where he built a great quadrant), Basel, and Freiburg. At the
   end of 1570 he was informed about his father's ill health, so he
   returned to Knudstrup, where his father died on May 9, 1571. Soon
   after, his other uncle Steen Bille helped him build an observatory and
   alchemical laboratory at Herrevad Abbey.

Family life

   In 1572, in Knudstrup, Tycho fell in love with Kirsten Jørgensdatter, a
   commoner whose father, Pastor Jorgen Hansen, was the Lutheran clergyman
   of Knudstrup's village church. Under Danish law, when a nobleman and a
   common woman lived together openly as husband and wife, and she wore
   the keys to the household at her belt like any true wife, their
   alliance became a binding morganatic marriage after three years. The
   husband retained his noble status and privileges; the wife remained a
   commoner. Their children were legitimate in the eyes of the law, but
   they were commoners like their mother and could not inherit their
   father's name, coat of arms, or land property. (Skautrup 1941, pp.
   24-5)

   Kirsten Jørgensdatter gave birth to their first daughter, Kirstine
   (named after Tycho's late sister who died at 13) on October 12, 1573.
   Together they had eight children, six of whom lived to adulthood. In
   1574, they moved to Copenhagen where their daughter Magdalene was born.
   Kirsten and Tycho lived together for almost thirty years until Tycho's
   death.

Tycho's Elk

   Tycho was said to own one percent of the entire wealth of Denmark at
   one point in the 1580s and he often held large social gatherings in his
   castle. He kept a dwarf named Jepp (who Tycho believed was clairvoyant)
   as a court jester who sat under the table during dinner. Pierre
   Gassendi wrote that Tycho also had a tame elk, and that his mentor the
   Landgraf Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel asked about an animal faster than a
   deer. Tycho replied writing there were none, but he could send his tame
   elk. When Wilhelm replied he would accept one in exchange for a horse,
   Tycho replied with the sad news that the elk just died on a visit to
   entertain a nobleman at Landskrona. Apparently during dinner the elk
   had drunk a lot of beer and fell down the stairs, and died.

Death

   Tycho died on October 24, 1601, several days after straining his
   bladder during a banquet. It had been said that to leave the banquet
   before it concluded would be the height of bad manners, and so he
   remained. His bladder, stretched to its limit, exploded; however, this
   is regarded as impossible by most physicians. He died after eleven
   agonizing days. Other sources say that he ate so much food that his
   digestives tracts ruptured, causing death by internal bleeding.

   Recent investigations have suggested that Tycho did not die from
   urinary problems but most likely from mercury poisoning: toxic levels
   of it have been found in his hair and hair-roots. Tycho may have
   poisoned himself unintentionally by imbibing some mercury-containing
   medicine. Some have even speculated that Tycho may have been murdered,
   possibly by Kepler - though there is no evidence for this. Yet another
   theory is that he was treating his syphilis with mercury leading to an
   overdose.

   Tycho Brahe's body is currently interred in a tomb in the Church of Our
   Lady in front of Týn near Old Town Square near the Astronomical Clock
   in Prague.

Career: observing the heavens

   Tycho Brahe
   Enlarge
   Tycho Brahe

Supernova

   On November 11, 1572, Tycho observed (from Herrevad Abbey) a very
   bright star which unexpectedly appeared in the constellation
   Cassiopeia, now named SN 1572. Since it had been maintained since
   antiquity that the world beyond the orbit of the moon, i.e. that of the
   fixed stars, was eternal and unchangeable (a fundamental axiom of the
   Aristotelian world view: celestial immutability), other observers held
   that the phenomenon was something in the Earth's atmosphere. Tycho,
   however, observed that the parallax of the object did not change from
   night to night, suggesting that the object was far away. Tycho argued
   that a nearby object should appear to shift its position with respect
   to the background. He published a small book, De Stella Nova ( 1573),
   thereby coining the term nova for a "new" star (we now know that
   Tycho's star in Cassiopeia was a supernova 7500 light years from earth,
   today known as SN 1572). This discovery was decisive for his choice of
   astronomy as a profession. Tycho was strongly critical of those who
   dismissed the implications of the astronomical appearance, writing in
   the preface to De Stella Nova: "O crassa ingenia. O caecos coeli
   spectatores" ("Oh thick wits. Oh blind watchers of the sky").

   Tycho's discovery was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's poem, Al
   Aaraaf. In 1998, Sky & Telescope magazine published an article by
   Donald W. Olson, Marilynn S. Olson and Russell L. Doescher arguing, in
   part, that Tycho's supernova was also the same "star that's westward
   from the pole" in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Heliocentrism

   In this depiction of the Tychonic system, the objects on blue orbits
   (the moon and the sun) rotate around the earth. The objects on orange
   orbits (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) rotate around the
   sun. Around all is sphere of fixed stars.
   Enlarge
   In this depiction of the Tychonic system, the objects on blue orbits
   (the moon and the sun) rotate around the earth. The objects on orange
   orbits (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) rotate around the
   sun. Around all is sphere of fixed stars.

   Kepler tried, but was unable, to persuade Tycho to adopt the
   heliocentric model of the solar system. Tycho believed in a modified
   geocentric model known as the Tychonic system, for the same reasons
   that he argued that the supernova of 1572 was not near the Earth. He
   argued that if the Earth were in motion, then nearby stars should
   appear to shift their positions with respect to background stars. In
   fact, this effect of parallax does exist; but it could not be observed
   with the naked eye, or even with the telescopes of the next two hundred
   years, because even the nearest stars are much more distant than most
   astronomers of the time believed possible. The Tychonic system is very
   similar to the Copernican one, except that it has a static earth
   instead of a static sun.

   In the years following Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus in
   1610, which made the Ptolemaic system intractable, the Tychonic system
   became the major competitor with Copernicanism, and was adopted by the
   Roman Catholic Church for many years as its official astronomical
   conception of the universe.

Uraniborg, Stjerneborg, and Benátky nad Jizerou

   Watercolor plan of Uraniborg
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   Watercolor plan of Uraniborg

   King Frederick II of Denmark and Norway, impressed with Tycho's 1572
   observations, financed the construction of two observatories for Tycho
   on the island of Hven in Oresund. These were Uraniborg and Stjerneborg.
   Uraniborg also had a laboratory for his alchemical experiments.

   Because Tycho disagreed with Christian IV, the new king of his country,
   he left Hven in 1597 and moved to Prague in 1599. Sponsored by Rudolf
   II, the Holy Roman Emperor, he built a new observatory in a castle in
   Benátky nad Jizerou, 50 km from Prague, and he worked there for one
   year. The emperor then had him move back to Prague, where he stayed
   until his death.

   In return for their support, Tycho's duties included preparing
   astrological charts and predictions for his patrons on events such as
   births, weather forecasting, and providing astrological interpretations
   of significant astronomical events such as the comet of 1577 and the
   supernova of 1572.

Astronomy

   Mural quadrant (Tycho Brahe 1598)
   Enlarge
   Mural quadrant (Tycho Brahe 1598)
   Danish stamp of 1946 featuring Tycho Brahe.
   Enlarge
   Danish stamp of 1946 featuring Tycho Brahe.

   Tycho was the preeminent observational astronomer of the pre-telescopic
   period, and his observations of stellar and planetary positions
   achieved unparalleled accuracy for their time. For example, Tycho
   measured Earth's axial tilt as 23 degrees and 31.5 minutes, which he
   claimed to be more accurate than Copernicus by 3.5 minutes. After his
   death, his records of the motion of the planet Mars enabled Kepler to
   discover the laws of planetary motion, which provided powerful support
   for the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system.

   Tycho himself was not a Copernican, but proposed a system in which the
   Sun orbited the Earth while the other planets orbited the Sun. His
   system provided a safe position for astronomers who were dissatisfied
   with older models but were reluctant to accept the Earth's motion. It
   gained a considerable following after 1616 when Rome decided officially
   that the heliocentric model was contrary to both philosophy and
   Scripture, and could be discussed only as a computational convenience
   that had no connection to fact. His system also offered a major
   innovation: while both the geocentric model and the heliocentric model
   as set forth by Copernicus relied on the idea of transparent rotating
   crystalline spheres to carry the planets in their orbits, Tycho
   eliminated the spheres entirely.

   He was aware that a star observed near the horizon appears with a
   greater altitude than the real one, due to atmospheric refraction, and
   he worked out tables for the correction of this source of error.

   To perform the huge number of products needed to produce much of his
   astronomical data, Tycho relied heavily on the then-new technique of
   prosthaphaeresis, an algorithm for approximating products based on
   trigonometric identities that predated logarithms.

Astrology

   Like the fifteenth century astronomer Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe
   appears to have accepted astrological prognostications on the principle
   that the heavenly bodies undoubtedly influenced (yet did not determine)
   terrestrial events, but expressed skepticism about the multiplicity of
   interpretative schemes, and increasingly preferred to work on
   establishing a sound mathematical astronomy. Two early tracts, one
   entitled Against Astrologers for Astrology, and one on a new method of
   dividing the sky into astrological houses, were never published and are
   unfortunately now lost.

   Tycho also worked in the area of weather prediction, produced
   astrological interpretations of the supernova of 1572 and the comet of
   1577, and furnished his patrons Frederick II and Rudolph II with
   nativities and other predictions (thereby strengthening the ties
   between patron and client by demonstrating value). An astrological
   worldview was fundamental to Tycho's entire philosophy of nature. His
   interest in alchemy, particularly the medical alchemy associated with
   Paracelsus, was almost as long-standing as his study of astrology and
   astronomy simultaneously, and Uraniborg was constructed as both
   observatory and laboratory.

   In an introductory oration to the course of lectures he gave in
   Copenhagen in 1574, Tycho defended astrology on the grounds of
   correspondences between the heavenly bodies, terrestrial substances
   (metals, stones etc.) and bodily organs ( medical astrology). He was
   later to emphasise the importance of studying alchemy and astrology
   together with a pair of emblems bearing the mottoes: Despiciendo
   suspicio ("By looking down I see upward") and Suspiciendo despicio ("By
   looking up I see downward"). As several scholars have now argued,
   Tycho's commitment to a relationship between macrocosm and microcosm
   even played a role in his rejection of Copernicanism and his
   construction of a third world-system.

Named after Tycho

     * Tycho crater on the Moon.
     * Tycho Brahe crater on Mars.

     * A Scandlines ferry connecting Helsingør in Denmark and Helsingborg
       in Sweden.
     * A science college in Helsingborg

     * Tycobrahe Sound Company of Hermosa Beach, California.

     * The name of American electronic musician Tycho: Tycho (
       http://www.tychomusic.com/)
     * The name of an Australian powersynth band: Tycho Brahe (
       http://www.tycho.com.au/)
     * An old name of an Irish synthpop band, now called Tychonaut (
       http://www.tychonaut.com).

     * Tycho Brahe, pseudonym of Jerry Holkins and a character from the
       popular webcomic Penny Arcade.

     * The AI Tycho from Bungie's computer game Marathon.
     * Brother-Captain Tycho of the Blood Angels Chapter of Space Marines
       in Games Workshop's sci-fi tabletop wargame, Warhammer 40,000.
     * Tycho Brahe is the name of a mysterious planetoid in the computer
       game Descent II.
     * Tycho Celchu, a character from Star Wars.
     * In the PC game Tachyon: The Fringe, the TCG repair freighter in the
       third Bora mission is named Tycho Brahe.
     * Tycho is mentioned as the least offensive of all the magicians that
       the demon Bartimaus has served in the Bartimaeus trilogy
     * Tycho Tithonus, the main character in William Sleator's 1981 book
       The Green Futures of Tycho

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