Museum Finds Astronomer Galileo’s Lost Body Parts
From BBC News
Two fingers and a tooth belonging to famed astronomer Galileo Galilei have been found more than 100 years after going missing, a museum in Italy says.
A collector bought the items, lost since 1905, at auction and gave them to Florence’s History of Science Museum.
The museum said it had no doubt about the authenticity of the items.
Scientists cut the parts – plus another finger and a vertebrae – from Galileo’s body in 1737, almost 100 years after he died.
Galileo, who lived from 1564 to 1642, was a hugely influential physicist and astronomer who helped develop the telescope.
He was branded a heretic by Italian authorities for supporting Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth rotated around the Sun.
The body parts were removed from him 95 years after his death, when Church authorities decreed he could be reburied in consecrated ground.
[Read more at BBC News]
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Western Artwork
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Galileo thermometers
