AP reports…on the BBC, Boston News and elsewhere…
Nicolaus Copernicus face has been digitally generated from the remains of his skull found last August in a grave in Frombork Cathedral in Poland, where he worked and died. The likeness of the reconstruction to existing portraits strongly confirm the findings.
Copernicus, a clergyman first, astronomer in his spare time, is most famous for his heliocentric theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not that Earth was at the center of the universe like the prevailing Ptolemaic model indicated.
His work seismically shifted the foundations of astronomy work to come, it was continued in Tycho Brahe’s work, further developed by Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.
It would’ve surprised Copernicus to know that the heavenly bodies he so admired as the work of God would lead to conflict with the church. In 1632 Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World – Ptolemaic and Copernican, a dialogue between Simplicio, advocating the Copernican model, and Salviati who advocated the Copernican. This eventually led to the Inquisition charging Galileo with Heresy and lifelong imprisonment. As the apocryphal legend goes, as the church denied his theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun and condenmed him, Galileo muttered under his breath “Eppur Si Muove” (“And yet, it does move”).
Copernicus would be even sadder to find that today religious fundamentalism on the rise is just as divorced from the natural sciences and clings on to ignorant superstitious counter-reasoning (i.e. ‘intelligent design’).
On other astronomy news of theological importance…
… from Scientific American and NASA …
“NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope snapped pictures of a distant quasar in the 
Draco constellation”
“We think we are seeing the collective light from millions of the first objects to form in the universe,”
“The objects disappeared eons ago, yet their light is still traveling across the universe.”
The top picture is the original photograph. It shows all the stars and objects we already knew about.
But after removing all of these objects we end up with the bottom picture. Clearly, it’s not nothing, the hazy clouds are nascent stars, the first to be formed in the universe.
Before them, it was mostly hydrogen and helium chaotically crashing into each other in the darkness. Then came this warm starry glow, the earliest light from these earliest nascent stars.
=Cogey
