Tycho Brahe Biography

Tycho Brahe

            Tycho Brahe, a famous Danish astronomer who was born on December 15^th, 1546 in Scania Denmark now a day Sweden- and died on October 24^th, 1601 in Prague.  Tycho Brahe was born with the name Tycho Ottesen Brahe; he was born in a noble family and was very well respected.  Tycho Brahe was born into a rather large family with a twin who died at birth.  His uncle, took him away from his biological family (well with his OTHER biological family, not his direct family but still family) and raised him as his own, in accordance to a deal that had been struck with Tycho’ s parents. He was raised to be a scholar by his foster/step parents, and was already studying law at the University of Coperhagen when he was only 12 years old, but it was astronomy and solar eclipses that had caught his eye.  As a young man Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel with Manderup Parsburg who aslo happened to be his 3^rd cousin, the dispute wass over a simple math problem, which led to him wearing a prosthetic fake gold nose.  Having been a man of great social standings it was known that Mr. Brahe was quite the Party animal, constantly throwing gargantuan parties and getting his PET HOUSE TRAINED MOOSE drunk.

            Tycho Brahe was the last of the Great Astronomers who worked with the naked-eye, creating the most precise instruments the world has ever known without the aid of scopes or tools that zoom in.  On November 11th 1572 Tycho Brahe discovered a super nova that had appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia, he came to the conclusion that it was much farther away from the Earth than the Moon as it lacked in a parallax unlike the Moon.  Tycho Brahe was well renown for his observations of astronomical objects in large variety, and was praised for his precise predictions and the quantity of things he observed.  Tycho's observations were so precise that they were said to be within one arcminute, while not completely true it was the reputation that inspired such tales.  While Tycho Brahe had not believed in a Heliocentric model of the universe and was not a Copernican he did propose a Geo-heliocentric model in which the the Sun and the Moon revolved around the Earth and the rest of the planets revolving around the Sun, a completely wrong model of the universe despite his incredible observations. His model of the universe was most likely  influenced by the idea that if he HAD proposed a heliocentric model then he probably would've been prosecuted and killed for saying all things didn't revolve around the Earth, which would've contradicted what the church said to be true.

               Tycho left behind more than just money and power when he passed away from kidney failure after having to "hold it in" too long at a party held by the king Prague, he also passed on his legacy. Kepler Tycho's assistant used Tycho's records on the path of Mars to create his 3 planetary laws of motion, which went on to change the world.  

SOURCES

Unknown, . N.p.. Web. 21 Oct 2013. <http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/brahe.html>.

Reynolds , Morgan. Tycho Brahe: Mapping the Heavens. 2003. Print.