Helen FieldsScience Writer

At the beginning of Thanksgiving week, a group of scientists were gathering in Prague to do something a little odder than buying a turkey: exhuming a 15th-century astronomer. The astronomer was Tycho Brahe. He was a weird guy. He lost a chunk of his nose in a duel in 1546 and wore a thin metal plate to cover it. He convinced Denmark’s king to pay for a palace-slash-observatory on a private island, where he made precise measurements of the skies and hung out with a dwarf. I’m not kidding. He was weird.

He’s most famous among non-astronomy-historians for the story of how he died: supposedly he was too polite to leave a royal banquet to pee and his bladder burst. Ok, I don’t even know if it’s possible to die from that. His assistant, Johannes Kepler, did record that Brahe came home from a banquet with abdominal pain and died 10 days later, but that could’ve been anything.

Brahe has been exhumed once before, in 1901, and analysis of a bit of hair from that exhumation found mercury. Part of the reason for exhuming him again is to figure out what medicines he was taking when he died. He liked to mix his own, and mercury would have been an ingredient. So it’s possible he poisoned himself. Or maybe someone else poisoned him. There’s a historian with a theory about how someone poisoned Brahe, and there was royal intrigue involved, and somehow it inspired Hamlet. They also planned to inspect the remains of the red silk suit he was buried in, to see what fancy noblemen wore in the Renaissance. (The thin metal nose-plate, unfortunately, disintegrated over the centuries.)

I wrote a brief item about the exhumation for Science magazine. You have to be a subscriber to read it. Here’s the link. And here’s a New York Times story about how Tycho Brahe’s story would make a great movie.

Here’s the story I was talking about yesterday. Yeah, it’s in German. Google Translator actually does a pretty good job with it – select German to English, paste the URL in the box, and it’ll show you the page in English.

Extra fun – you can scroll down and read the comments. Ah, newspaper comment sections. They’re juvenile and abusive everywhere in the world. Actually, most of these are kinda funny, and only one person swore he’s deleting the link from his computer and never reading Die Welt again. He was apparently upset that this “revolution and milestone in the research” did not get the appreciation it deserves.

Yeah…I’m not sure “revolution” and “milestone” are the right words for this study. I’d classify it as “pretty neat.” The whole idea of building telescopes in Antarctica is totally awesome, but it’s not new. This is just one more suggestion about a good place to put them.