Mario Guiducci

Discorso delle Comete from 1619

Mario Guiducci (* 1585 in Florence , † 1646 ) was an Italian astronomer and legal scholar .

He studied at the University of Pisa and became a confidante of Galileo Galilei . Under his name the tract Discorso Delle Comete was published in 1619 , but it was essentially a work by Galileo. The two worked together primarily between 1618 and 1623 when they argued with Orazio Grassi and other mathematicians at the Roman Collegium about the nature of comets . They rejected the theory of Orazio Grassi and Tycho Brahe that comets are celestial bodies that move outside the lunar orbit, and instead interpreted them as near-Earth optical phenomena.

literature

• Michael Weichenhan: "Ergo perit coelum ...". The supernova of 1572 and the overcoming of Aristotelian cosmology . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-515-08374-X (also dissertation, TU Berlin 2002)
• Stillman Drake and Charles D. O'Malley (eds.): The controversy on the comets of 1618. Galileo Galilei , Horation Grassi , Mario Giuducci, Johannes Kepler . University Press, Philadelphia, 1960.