As he lived just before the invention of the telescope, Tycho Brahe relied on his keen eyes to make observations that changed the science. Yet his face was more remarkable for a different feature: a golden nose.

In 1566, when Tycho was a 20-year-old student at the University of Rostock in Germany, he became embroiled in a drunken argument with another Danish nobleman named Manderup Parsbjerg. A duel ensued – in the dark – in the course of which Parsbjerg’s rapier lopped off much of the bridge of the future astronomer’s nose.

To mask the damage, Tycho – like Galileo Galilei, he is generally known by his first name – designed himself a metallic nose-job. Using an alloy of silver and gold, he fashioned a false nose that is said to have been remarkably realistic. Thenceforth, he carried a special paste around with him – historians differ on whether this was for reattaching the nose, or for polishing it.

The man with the golden nose may, in fact, have had several replacements. When his body was exhumed in 1901, on the 300th anniversary of his death, no precious prosthesis was found. His skull however, was stained green where the nose would have been. This may indicate that copper – which oxidises to a green colour – was used to build his nose. Some speculate that he had a lighter copper nose for everyday use, and saved the heavier silver-gold version for special occasions. Alternatively, a grave robber might have stolen the precious metal, and substituted a cheap alternative.

Tycho’s nasal appendage was far from his only unusual possession: at his family seat, Knutstorp castle, he kept a pet moose. His prized companion met a tragic end, falling downstairs after drinking beer at a banquet.

Another member of the nobleman’s unorthodox household was a dwarf named Jepp, whom Tycho considered to be clairvoyant. Tycho, who at one stage owned 1 per cent of all the wealth in Denmark, would often order silence at his feasts and make his guests listen to Jepp’s pronouncements. For all his quirks, however, Tycho was an astronomer of immense stature. Besides observing the supernova of 1572, he catalogued more than a thousand new stars, and made some of the most accurate measurements of celestial movements yet accomplished.

In his latter years, when working in Prague, he employed Johannes Kepler as his assistant. After Tycho’s death, Kepler was to use his master’s records of the movement of Mars to establish the laws of planetary motion.

Tycho, however, was off the scent on one critical astronomical matter: though well aware of Copernicus’s theory that the Earth orbits the Sun, he was unable to accept it. Instead, he proposed his own idiosyncratic cosmology, by which the Sun orbited the Earth, while the remaining planets orbited the Sun.

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