This one’s gotta hurt

The year was 1610, and Galileo Galilei was locked away, peering at the night sky through a new telescope. It was then he noticed something strange – a few objects glimmering near Jupiter seemed to change positions nightly, rotating around the immense planet.

He quickly jotted down the observation… and with every stroke of his pen, poked a bigger and bigger hole in the almost unanimously-held notion that everything in the universe revolved around Earth.

It was this groundbreaking document, the first written evidence of a theory that would wind up changing the world and getting the scientist imprisoned by the Catholic Church, that the University of Michigan thought they had in their possession for decades – up until recently.

📜🙅‍♀️ From Galileo → Galile – no... Nick Wilding, a historian at Georgia State University currently writing a biography on the famed Italian astronomer, first became suspicious of the manuscript’s authenticity in May, alerting officials after examining it on the university’s website. The word choices seemed strange, the letter forms were… off, and the ink at the top and bottom of the document looked the same – even though it was supposedly written months apart.

• And according to a university press release published yesterday, his instincts were right. The manuscript, thought to be from the early 1600s, is actually a 20th-century fake, most likely executed by the well-known forger Tobia Nicotra.

🖼 Zoom out: These types of forgeries aren’t all that uncommon. More than half of all art is either fake or mistakenly attributed, per a 2014 report from the Fine Art Expert Institute.