Friday, March 9, 2012

Tycho's Star Discoveries

 The Stars!!!!!!!!!!!!!


 Tycho was a star genius, but I of course helped him out a little :P


He loved to look at the stars and one day came to the conclusion that comets are not just components of Earth's atmosphere (which is what was thought before), but that the intriguing objects we're traveling through space and only passing through our solar system and hardly ever actually entering out atmosphere.


Tycho's love for the stars lead him to discovering the first supernova. This star was in the Cassiopeia constellation, as pictured below.      A Supernova is "a massive star that undergoes a sudden, extreme increase in brightness across the electromagnetic spectrum, followed by a more gradual decrease lasting from several days to several months. Supernovae occur when a super giant star collapses suddenly at the end of its life, condensing its core material into an extremely compact mass that then undergoes a slight rebound." Tycho didn't know all that at that time, but he did observe that the star was farther away than the moon and didn't change position like the planets did. It was already know that plants orbited the sun at this time.

This lead Tycho to conclude that this supernova was a fixed star in stellar space beyond the planets. He unlike other scientists did not name it after him self but instead just named it SN 1572 : SN standing for Supernova and 1572 being the year he discovered it.
Tycho also came up with his own lunar theory. This theory was brought about when he noticed variations in the moon's longitude and lunar orbit.  It was currently thought at the time that the moon orbited on a 5 degree plane of lunar orbit. What Tycho found was that in fact the moon's  orbit fluctuated depending on what part of the orbit i was in, and actually followed a elliptical pathway around the earth instead of a circular motion.

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