Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Exploration Age

Precision star catalogue and the nova of 1572 — Tycho Brahe

1572 AD · Transmission: Global
AstronomyMethodNordic

Tycho Brahe (Scania, 1546 – Prague, 1601), a Danish astronomer, observes in November 1572 a bright nova in Cassiopeia — the first documented supernova in the Western sky since antiquity — and demonstrates through parallax that it is not located in the sublunar sphere, refuting Aristotelian cosmology's immutable heavens. He builds on the island of Hven, funded by Frederick II of Denmark, the Uraniborg observatory (1576), the most precise of the pre-telescopic era. Over twenty years he accumulates measurements of planetary and stellar positions with a precision of 1–2 arcminutes — ten times better than any earlier work. This body of data, which Brahe failed to integrate into a complete theory, is the material on which Kepler builds his three laws. Brahe proposes the "Tychonic" system as a compromise between Ptolemy and Copernicus, but his real value is the quality of his data, not his theory.

InstitutionUraniborg Observatory — Island of Hven (present-day Sweden)
Historical regionKingdom of Denmark (present-day Sweden / Denmark)
Primary sourceBrahe, T. — De Nova Stella (1573); Brahe, T. — Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica (1598); Brahe, T. — Astronomiae Instauratae Progymnasmata (published posthumously by Kepler, 1602)
Secondary sourceDreyer, J.L.E. — Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century (1890); MacTutor — Brahe (St Andrews)
Original languageLatin
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