A quiz question · easy
How did the astronomer Tycho Brahe die in October 1601?
Brahe died of uremia caused by acute urinary retention — eleven days of fever after a Prague banquet at which he reportedly thought it impolite to leave the table to relieve himself. The Kepler-poisoning theory was popular for decades. The 2010 exhumation ruled it out.
Read the full story →From the story
The Astronomer Who Was Too Polite to Pee Tycho Brahe died because nobody told him he could leave the dinner table. Four centuries later they dug him up to find out for sure.
Daily quiz appearances
Related questions
- Tycho Brahe wore a metal prosthetic nose for 35 years after a duel cost him the bridge of his original. Literary tradition long said the prosthesis was silver and gold. What did 20th-century forensic analysis of his exhumed remains actually find?
- In 1620 the seventy-four-year-old mother of the great astronomer Johannes Kepler was arrested for witchcraft in the Duchy of Württemberg. The trial dragged on for six years. Who served as her lead defence lawyer?
- Johannes Kepler arrived at the University of Tübingen as a 17-year-old scholarship student in 1589. Which of his teachers privately taught him that the Copernican heliocentric system was correct — at a time when the Lutheran consistory's official curriculum required teaching the Ptolemaic geocentric system?
- On the evening of 11 November 1572, the 25-year-old Tycho Brahe walked back from his uncle's alchemical laboratory and looked up at the constellation Cassiopeia. He saw something that, by the medical-physical theory of the day, was not supposed to be possible. What was it?