Exhumation of Tycho Brahe

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," said  Marcellus [an officer] having just seen the ghost of Hamlet's father, the late king of Denmark----"Hamlet" Act I, Scene 4...William Shakespeare.

Why did they do this? Was it worth the expense?

"Mercury poisoning of Danish astronomer ruled out"

by

Karel Janicek

November 15th, 2012

The Huffington Post

Ever since Tycho Brahe died suddenly more than 400 years ago, there has been mystery about whether the Dane whose celestial observations laid the groundwork for modern astronomy fell victim to natural causes or was murdered.

On Thursday, scientists who had exhumed his body said one thing is clear: if he was murdered, it wasn't with mercury, as many rumors had claimed.

"We measured the concentration of mercury using three different quantitative chemical methods in our labs" in the Czech Republic and Denmark, said Kaare Lund Rasmussen, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Southern Denmark.

"All tests revealed the same result: that mercury concentrations were not sufficiently high to have caused his death. In fact, chemical analyses of the bones indicate that Tycho Brahe was not exposed to an abnormally high mercury load in the last five to 10 years of his life," Rasmussen said in a statement.

The scientists didn't say what did kill the astronomer, but tests on the remains are still being conducted.

Brahe's death in 1601 at the age of 54 was long believed to have been due to a bladder infection. Legend said it was the result of his reluctance to breach court etiquette during a reception by leaving for a toilet. Kidney disease was another suspect.

But some speculated that he might have been poisoned with mercury, even at the hands of a king or a rival astronomer.

"Brahe's famous assistant (astronomer) Johannes Kepler has been identified as a possible murder suspect, and other candidates have been singled out for suspicion throughout the years." said Jens Vellev, a professor of medieval archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark, who heads the Czech-Danish team of scientists that conducted the research.

Some even contend that a cousin of Brahe's killed him on the orders of Danish King Christian IV for allegedly having an affair with the king's mother.

Tests conducted in 1996 in Sweden, and later in Denmark, on samples of Brahe's mustache and hair obtained in a 1901 exhumation, showed unusually high levels of mercury, supporting the poisoning theory.

But Vellev wasn't satisfied with that conclusion and he won permission from the church and Prague authorities to reopen the tomb, saying the remains needed to be analyzed with contemporary technology.

His team opened Brahe's tomb in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square two years ago.

Tests on Brahe's beard and bones resolved the mercury question, Vellev said, but work is still being done on his teeth and that could determine his cause of death.

Brahe was born in 1546 at his family's ancestral castle in Scania, then part of Denmark, and he studied astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and in Germany. He worked at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II at a time when Prague was an imperial city.

In 1572, Brahe detected a new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. At the time the heavens were thought to be unchanging, so his discovery was startling. The next year, he became the first astronomer to describe a supernova, or exploding stars.

The exhumation also shed light on another mystery linked to Brahe – his artificial nose.

The astronomer had part of his nose sliced off in a 1566 duel with a fellow nobleman while a student in the German city of Rostock, and the missing piece was replaced by a metal plate.

"Surprisingly, our analyses revealed that the prosthesis was not made of precious metals, as was previously supposed," Vellev said. He said the samples contained "traces of equal parts copper and zinc, which indicates that the prosthesis was made of brass."


Macabre...Galileo's lost tooth and fingers

An issue between Tycho Brahe and Copernicus

Tycho Brahe, the most prominent and accomplished astronomer of his era, made measurements of the apparent sizes of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets. From these he showed that within a geocentric cosmos these bodies were of comparable sizes, with the Sun being the largest body and the Moon the smallest. He further showed that within a heliocentric cosmos, the stars had to be absurdly large — with the smallest star dwarfing even the Sun. (The results of Tycho’s calculations are illustrated in this paper.) Various Copernicans responded to this issue of observation and geometry by appealing to the power of God: They argued that giant stars were not absurd because even such giant objects were nothing compared to an infinite God, and that in fact the Copernican stars pointed out the power of God to humankind. Tycho rejected this argument.

"REGARDING HOW TYCHO BRAHE NOTED THE ABSURDITY OF THE COPERNICAN THEORY REGARDING THE BIGNESS OF STARS, WHILE THE COPERNICANS APPEALED TO GOD TO ANSWER THAT ABSURDITY" by Christopher M. Graney Jefferson Community & Technical

Tycho Brahe...an early astronomical observer

Goes to illustrate that science is a function of team work.

"A feisty man of science"

by


Perry Vlahos

October 27th, 2011

The Sydney Morning Herald

Tycho Brahe observed the sky before the age of telescopes.

MANY think of Tycho Brahe as the most significant astronomical observer before the invention of the telescope and well worthy of the prominent crater on the moon named after him. Yet, in the hours before his death on October 24, 1601, lying in the grip of a fever rending him delirious, Brahe reportedly said, ''May I not have lived in vain.''

Born in 1546 in Scania, then part of Denmark, to one of the highest-ranking noble families, he was raised by his paternal uncle. At university in 1560 he saw a solar eclipse, which piqued his interest in astronomy.

Not lacking confidence, he challenged another student to a sword duel over claims of who was the better mathematician. In the ensuing contest, Brahe lost part of the bridge of his nose and would then on wear a silver plate to cover the offending area; he reportedly wore a gold one to church.

His impressive scholarship reached the ears of King Frederick, who offered the island Ven on which to build an observatory and substantial funds to run such an institution. Estimates suggest 5 per cent of Denmark treasury funds were used in the venture - a staggering sum, underlying the ubiquitous faith placed in Brahe. He took possession of Ven in 1574 and built a castle and observatory he called ''Uraniborg'', or ''heavenly castle''. It was the last purpose-built astronomical observatory not to feature a telescope - its invention lying almost 30 years in the future.

Discovering most records of previous observations were not exacting enough, Brahe designed, manufactured and calibrated new instruments allowing unprecedented accuracy. Ven became a revered centre of learning and had as many as 100 assistants sourced from European universities. International scholars visited and he trained the next generation of astronomers. It even boasted its own press.

In 1572, he observed the second-last supernova to be seen in the Milky Way and five years later the comet of 1577. The accepted Ptolemaic model at that time featured the Earth at the centre of the universe, encircled by glass spheres supporting each of the orbiting moon, sun and planets and, lastly, the stars. The sphere of stars was thought unchanging and comets an atmospheric phenomenon.

The fact a supernova appeared where no star resided before refuted the earlier claim. Furthermore, highly accurate parallax measurements of the comet also indicated irrefutably to Brahe that the comet was way out of the Earth's atmosphere and further than the sphere of the moon.

As such, this required a rethink on the held model of the universe. He came up with an original concept that sat between the Ptolemaic and Copernican models. Brahe did away with the glass spheres and continued to hold Earth at the centre, with moon and sun orbiting it, but the rest of the planets orbiting the sun.

In 1597, after falling out of favour with new king Christian following Frederick's death, he left Denmark, packing up books, instruments and observations, eventually ending up in Prague as the Imperial Mathematician. This was incredibly significant, for in this new location his main assistant was Johannes Kepler, a mathematical genius.

Following Brahe's death in 1601, Kepler used the superb detail and accuracy of Brahe's collected observations to formulate his laws of planetary motion; without this trove of painstakingly collected data, astronomy may have not burst forth to the new age till much later.

Tycho Brahe [Wikipedia]