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 to believe the distance of Mars from the Earth at opposition (that is, when Mars is on the opposite side of the sky from the Sun) was less than that of the Sun from the Earth. Tycho believed this because he came to believe Mars had a greater daily parallax than the Sun. But, in 1584, in a letter to a fellow astronomer, Brucaeus, he had claimed that Mars had been further than the Sun at the opposition of 1582, because he had observed that Mars had little or no daily parallax. He said he had therefore rejected Copernicus's model