Sophia Brahe Sophia Brahe Sophia or Sophie Brahe or after marriage Sophie Thott Lange (22 September 1556 or 24 August 1559 – 1643), was a Danish horticulturalist with knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. She assisted her brother Tycho Brahe with his astronomical observations. She was born in Knudstrup, as the youngest of ten children, to Otte Brahe "rigsråd," or advisor to the King of Denmark; and Beate Bille Brahe, leader of the royal household for Queen Sophie. Sophia's oldest brother was astronomer Tycho Brahe. Though he was both more than a decade her senior and raised in a separate household, the
Tycho Brahe architecture. When he realized that the towers of Uraniborg were not adequate as observatories because of the instruments' exposure to the elements and the movement of the building, he then constructed a second underground observatory at nearby Stjerneborg in 1581. The basement included an alchemical laboratory with 16 furnaces for conducting distillations and other chemical experiments. Unusually for the time, Tycho established Uraniborg as a research centre, where almost 100 students and artisans worked from 1576 to 1597. Uraniborg also contained a printing press and a paper mill, both among the first in Scandinavia, enabling Tycho to publish his own