Hi AQUILAnauts, my name is Maggie Aderin- Pocock and I’ m here to tell you about the life of a super stargazer and daring Dane: the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe.
What was so super about Tycho Brahe? Ed
You mean the guy who studied the solar system and recorded the accurate positions of more than 777 stars WITHOUT the use of a telescope, whilst also attending as many parties as he possibly could AND changing the way we think about the universe?
Hmm, that is quite super, but how did he manage to do all that stargazing without so much as an iPhone? Ed
Today we tend to think that you need a telescope to do astronomy, but that’ s not actually the case. Just by looking up into the night sky, you can take in a lot of information. You can see the Moon( obviously!) but also planets, stars and constellations, comets, meteorites and even satellites.
And even though Tycho didn’ t have a telescope, he did have scientific books and instruments. He had an astrolabe – an instrument which was used to carry out astronomical measurements, so he was able to calculate the positions of the Sun and the stars without the need of a telescope. Tycho became extremely good at collecting data. Eventually, his calculations would be indirectly used by Isaac Newton to develop his theory of gravitation!
OK, so what exactly was he looking for?
Tycho and his astronomer mates were particularly interested in what happened when an object in the night sky crossed a certain point, like an imaginary line in the sky. Many ancient cultures noticed that some things moved in an unusual way, moving forwards and backwards in the sky over several months – and they called these moving objects‘ wandering stars’. The Greek word for‘ wandering’ is planetai, and that’ s how these wandering stars came to be known as planets!
Tycho Brahe’ s most famous accomplishment was accurately predicting planetary motion and cataloguing stars. He was able to show that Mars’ s orbit is not a perfect circle, for example. He was also one of the first people to spot a new object in 1572, which people later realised was a supernova.
Eye strAin SupeRnovA!
Tycho spotted the new object in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Using a scientific theory called parallax, he managed to show that this object was much further away from us than people thought possible. Now we know that this wasn’ t a‘ new’ object at all. In fact, the light he saw was the exploding death of something very, very old – a star. We call these explosions Supernova and the one Tycho Brahe saw was happening in a different galaxy. His discovery proved, once and for all, that the heavens are ever-changing. So, I’ d say Tycho Brahe was fairly super, wouldn’ t you?
FUN FACT TRUMPET Tycho was given the land and funds to build a castle observatory on a private island. He had an underground lab for studying alchemy and he employed a clairvoyant jester named Jep.
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