Posted on behalf of Roberta Kwok

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first use of a telescope, the great astronomer will be… exhumed?

Yes, curious scientists have applied for permission to take a DNA sample from Galileo’s body, which currently lies in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. He’s not the only one up for un-entombment: 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe could also be exhumed for a belated autopsy to determine whether he was murdered by a shifty cousin acting on the King of Denmark’s orders.

Why the sudden interest in deceased stargazers? In Galileo’s case, a team of scientists wants to figure out how the astronomer’s eye problems might have distorted his observations. “If we knew exactly what was wrong with his eyes we could use computer models to recreate what he saw in his telescope,” says Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of History and Science in Florence (Reuters). Galileo’s eyesight, which went downhill starting in his 40s and left him blind by the time he died, could explain why the astronomer mistakenly thought Saturn had bulges rather than a ring, Galluzzi says.

Brahe’s case is a bit more scandalous. The astronomer may have been offed by his cousin at the command of Christian IV, the King of Denmark, because of an affair between Brahe and the king’s mother, says scholar Peter Andersen at the University of Strasbourg (The Times). Andersen says he found “details of the attack and, indirectly, the murderer’s confession” in the diary of Brahe’s cousin last year (Telegraph). Analysis of a sample of Brahe’s hair, preserved by a Czech museum, suggests the likely murder weapon was mercury. But the rest of Brahe is in a Prague cathedral vault, so a team of archaeologists has requested permission to open it and settle the question of his death.

News outlets appear to be competing to see who can come up with the oddest biographical detail about Brahe. The astronomer “is said to have worn a prosthetic nose of gold and silver,” says the Times, “after losing his own at the age of 20 in a rapier duel resulting from a row over a mathematical formula.” Not to be outdone, the Telegraph notes that Brahe kept a “supposedly clairvoyant dwarf named Jepp” at his castle and owned a pet moose, which died falling down the stairs after getting drunk on beer.

Image: Galileo, from Astronomy Picture of the Day