[2] The supernova of 1572 is often called "Tycho's supernova", because of Tycho Brahe's extensive work De nova et nullius aevi memoria prius visa stella ("Concerning the Star, new and never before seen in the life or memory of anyone", published in 1573 with reprints overseen by Johannes Kepler in 1602 and 1610), a work containing both Brahe's own observations and the analysis of sightings from many other observers.

Comparisons between Brahe's observations and those of Spanish scientist Jerónimo Muñoz[3] revealed that the object was more distant than the Moon.

[2] Other Europeans to sight the supernova included Wolfgang Schuler, Christopher Clavius, Thomas Digges, John Dee, Francesco Maurolico, Tadeáš Hájek and Bartholomäus Reisacher [de].

[5] In England, Queen Elizabeth had the mathematician and astrologer Thomas Allen come and visit "to have his advice about the new star that appeared in the Swan or Cassiopeia ... to which he gave his judgement very learnedly", as the antiquary John Aubrey recorded in his memoranda a century later.

Around November 16, 1572, it reached its peak brightness at about magnitude −4.0, with some descriptions giving it as equal to Venus when that planet was at its brightest.

[2] The supernova remained visible to the naked eye into early 1574, gradually fading until it disappeared from view.

[1] The classification as a type Ia supernova of normal luminosity allows an accurate measure of the distance to SN 1572.

[12] The search for a supernova remnant was futile until 1952, when Robert Hanbury Brown and Cyril Hazard reported a radio detection at 158.5 MHz, obtained at the Jodrell Bank Observatory.

[17] The supernova remnant of B Cas was discovered in the 1960s by scientists with a Palomar Mountain telescope as a very faint nebula.

The supernova has been confirmed as Type Ia,[1] in which a white dwarf star has accreted matter from a companion until it approaches the Chandrasekhar limit and explodes.

In the ninth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus associates the appearance of the supernova with the youthful William Shakespeare, and in the November 1998 issue of Sky & Telescope, three researchers from Southwest Texas State University, Don Olson and Russell Doescher of the Physics Department and Marilynn Olson of the English Department, argued that this supernova is described in Shakespeare's Hamlet, specifically by Bernardo in Act I, Scene i.