Simon Marius , in German Simon Mayr (January 10th 1573 with Gunzenhausen - December 26th 1624 with Ansbach), is a German astronomer, to which one owes the name of the four principal satellites of Jupiter, known as the moons galiléennes.

Biography

After studies with the academy Lutheran of Heilbronn, where it is interested in the song, the Météorologie and the Astronomie, it is named in 1601 mathematician of the Margrave of Ansbach. It goes then to Prague, where it meets Tycho Brahé and David Fabricius, then to Padoue, where it studies medicine. Of return in Ansbach, it publishes the first translation in German of the first six books of Euclide. In 1607 it is implied in a business of plagiarism by Balthasar Capra: this one publishes a work of Galileo, the " Treaty of Compas" , under its own name. B. Capra will be expelled of the University. In 1609, it manages to manufacture a Telescope which enables him to start to observe Jupiter.

Four years after Galileo, in 1614, it makes appear the results of its observations in a work entitled Mundus Iovialis , where it claims to have discovered, a few days before Galileo, the four principal Jupiter moons, to which it gives the names which remained to them: Io, Europe, Ganymede and Callisto. But the oldest Jupiter observation consigned by S. Marius goes back to December 1610 and the examples which it gives in his work go back to 1613. The primacy of discovered Jupiter satellites will highly be asserted by Galileo who will show it plagiarism. In the same work, Simon Marius also announced to have discovered the Galaxie of Andromède, qualified at the time of “Nébuleuse”. Although it was known of the astronomer Persan Al-Soufi at the 10th century, it is admitted that he is the first astronomer to have observed it by means of a telescope.

Simon Marius also published astronomical tables, in particular satellites of Jupiter, and forecasts astrological, as well as a book on the Comet S of 1618 and another, posthumous, on the Cercle of position of Ptolémée.

External bonds

• Biographical note of the site Mundi Imago * Biographical notes of the Galileo Project * The discovery of the Jupiter satellites * Biography of Simon Marius

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