Astronomy- A Historical Saga: Part 3.3.2

3.2

Tycho Brahe

Alfonsin/Rudolfin Table

After Copernicus, thus comes Tycho Brahe- a scientist born in a royal family. His biography is amazing and full of wonders. But that is not the fact here. The main fact here is his contribution for astronomy. We will try to describe his contribution as briefly as we can.

August 24, 1563; Tycho was observing the sky. He discovered the transit of Saturn and Jupiter. Alfonsin Table and Prutenic Table- the very popular journal of that time were analyzed by Tycho and he found that, both of the journals predicted wrong about the incident. In November 1572, a new star was noticed by Tycho in the Cassiopeia constellation. It is called the ‘Tycho’s supernova’. Tycho observed that supernova from different places of Europe but found no parallax of that star. He came to decision that, it is a new star and way too far from here, very far in the sky. Tycho wrote a book on it named as The Stella Nova.

Danish king Fredrick the second became very glad at Tycho for his research. King gave him a lot of money and wealth and gave the power of Hovin Island on Tycho. In patron of the king, Tycho established an observatory on that island. Tycho’s observatory became an astronomical research lab to the world of that time. Tycho did great, but he also did a huge mistake. He thought that earth cannot move. So, he denied Copernican concept and the concept of Ptolemy also. Thus, Tycho made a new model of the universe where the earth is the center of everything and the sun and the moon moves around it and the other planets moves around the sun.

Tychonian System

Tycho had a great talent of observing. There was no telescope that time. But his works are really incredible. In 1588 king second Fredrick died and his son ascended the thrones as his heir. Tycho and the new king had an enmity and Tycho left the observatory with what he had. He moves in to the capital of Bohemia, Prague. He took the post of royal-mathematician of king second Rudolf. He was given the job to correct the Alfonsin Table and it had to be named after the king as Rudolfin Table. Tycho wanted to make the table according to his model instead of Ptolemy’s model as he wanted to prove his model as correct. He employed some mathematicians and astronomers as his assistants. One of them was Johannes Kapler.

In a night of November 1601, Tycho became sick of over-eating in a royal feast. After nine days, he died. But before death, he requested the king to employ Kapler in his post. According to Tycho’s last will, Kapler, who was from a poor family, got the post where Tycho was. Kapler developed a new kind of astronomy basing on Tycho’s observation.

After Tycho, Kapler came and made another revolution in astronomy. He made a sun-centered model again. But he used some unique geometric shapes in his model. Thus, his model became more error-free than ever before. He extended the concept of the universe and made a revolution in the mass view about astrophysics.