RT Article
T1 As Big as a Universe: Johannes Kepler on the Immensities of Stars and of Divine Power
JF The catholic historical review
VO 105
IS 1
SP 75
OP 90
A1 Graney, Christopher M. 1966-
LA English
PB The Catholic University of America Press
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1676782184
AB Johannes Kepler accepted Tycho Brahe's claim that the Copernican hypothesis required all stars to be giant, something Brahe found absurd. Kepler argued in his De Stella Nova that some stars were larger than Brahe's size for the entire universe. He also used the issue of star sizes to argue against Giordano Bruno's infinite universe. Kepler's acceptance of Brahe's ideas on star sizes appears in a variety of his writings, including his response to the anti-Copernican essay by Msgr. Francesco Ingoli that cited the star size issue, an essay Galileo had felt was influential in the rejection of the Copernican hypothesis by authorities in Rome in 1616. Kepler's writings illustrate how certain supporters of Copernicus viewed the universe of stars and relied on divine power to undergird that view. Decades after Kepler, the discovery that the star size problem rested on a formerly unrecognized optical effect both freed the Copernican hypothesis from Brahe's charge of absurdity and negated Kepler's argument against Bruno.
K1 Astronomy; Religious aspects
K1 Brahe, Tycho, 1546-1601
K1 Bruno, Giordano, 1548-1600
K1 Copernicus
K1 Francesco Ingoli
K1 Giordano Bruno
K1 Heliocentric model (Astronomy)
K1 Ingoli, Francesco, 1578-1649
K1 Johannes Kepler
K1 Kepler, Johannes, 1571-1630
K1 Sun
K1 Tyco Brahe
K1 heliocentrism
K1 star size argument
DO 10.1353/cat.2019.0045