Tyge Ottesen Brahe (1546 - 1601)

Born 14 Dec 1546 in Knutstorp, Skåne, Denmark

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 24 Oct 1601 at age 54 in Prague, Bohemia

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Biography

Tycho Brahe is Notable.

Danish astronomer, mathematician, and alchemist, he coined the term "nova" (as in supernova) and established a giant observatory called Uraniborg, where he studied the movements of celestial bodies. Tycho Brahe lost the bridge of his nose in a sword duel against another Danish nobleman, Manderup Parsberg, in 1566; thereafter, he wore a false nose made of brass. He never formally married the mother of his eight children, and kept a pet moose that died after it drunkenly fell down the stairs of Brahe's castle.

His books include Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica.

Children include Sidsel Brahe, Claudius Brahe, and Elisabeth Brahe.

Siblings include Sophia Brahe, Steen Brahe, Lisbet Brahe, and Maren Brahe.

The basis of the TYCHOS model of the solar system was first proposed in the 16th century by Tycho Brahe, the most rigorous and prolific observational astronomer of all times. Curiously, his work is often either ignored or unfairly disparaged. Using his meticulously recorded data, Tycho Brahe inferred that the Sun and Mars move around each other in a manner that we would identify today as a binary pair. Binary star systems were unknown in the 16th century, since the telescope had not yet been invented.

After his untimely death in 1601 (at age 55), Tycho Brahe’s favourite assistant Christen Longomontanus perfected his master’s lifetime work in his Astronomia Danica (1622), a monumental treatise regarded as Tycho Brahe’s testament.

Unfortunately, in spite of the unprecedented accuracy of Brahe’s lifelong observational enterprise, his proposed geometric configuration of our Solar System was ultimately flipped on its head by his young and ambitious assistant, Johannes Kepler: in what must be one of the most ruinous setbacks in the history of science, shortly after Tycho’s untimely death, Kepler went on to steal the bulk of his master’s laboriously compiled observational tables only to tweak and distort them through his tortuous algebraic efforts so as to make them appear compatible with the paradigm of the diametrically opposed, heliocentric Copernican model. As few people will know, Kepler was ultimately exposed (in 1988) for having crudely manipulated Brahe’s all-important observational data of Mars.

Sources

• The TYCHOS, Our Geoaxial Binary System (2nd Edition) by Simon Shack

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe as of 26 october 2016.

• http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/brahe.html [confirms basic data with a 1900 book as a reference. -J. Martinez]

See also:

• Wikidata: Item Q36620, en:Wikipedia