When, according to habit, I was contemplating the stars in a clear sky, I noticed a new and unusual star, surpassing the other stars in brilliancy. There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.

Moreover the only way the stars could be so distant and still appear the sizes they do in the sky would be if even average stars were gigantic — at least as big as the orbit of the Earth and of course vastly larger than the sun. From this event Tycho became interested in medicine and alchemy. Jørgen seems to have taken matters into his own hands and took the child away to his own residence Tosterup Castle.

Here from 1600 until his death in 1601 he was assisted by Johannes Kepler who later used Tycho's astronomical data to develop Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Tycho Brahe was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build the Uraniborg an early research institute where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements and later Stjerneborg underground when he discovered that his instruments in the former were not sufficiently steady. Furthermore he was the last of the major naked eye astronomers working without telescopes for his observations.