And again, an important contemporary document is revealed to be a forgery:
After an internal investigation of the findings of a Georgia State University professor of history, the University of Michigan Library has concluded that its "Galileo manuscript" — for almost a century considered one of the jewels of the library’s collection — is not a document written by Galileo himself in 1609 and 1610 but a 20th-century fake, most likely executed by the well-known forger Tobia Nicotra.
Researcher discovers "Galileo manuscript" forgery
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/arts/galileo-forgery-university-of-michigan.html
Nicotra has been called „perhaps the cleverest forger on record". Not much is known about him. He was probably responsible for more than 500 forgeries of letters, musical manuscripts, and other manuscripts attributed to figures such as George Washington, Christopher Columbus, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Gluck, and Händel. Well-known institutions bought his forgeries and for a long time considered them to be originals.
The question arises whether there was a network in Italy behind Nicotra that commissioned these forgeries. Milan has always been a stronghold of papal forgery workshops. According to Gedeon Borsa, about 60% of the printing presses in the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy were located in six cities (Venice, Rome, Milan, Naples, Bologna, and Florence).
Nicotra used a paper with the watermark AS/BMO from a paper mill in Bergamo in Italy, which was used only from 1790, more than 150 years later than claimed.
And the document, according to the university, was thought to be among the first pieces of “observational data that showed objects orbiting a body other than the earth.”
A 17th-Century Galileo Manuscript Proving the Earth Isn't the Center of the Universe Has Been Deemed a 20th-Century Forgery | Artnet News
The connection to the Vatican is a cardinal named Pietro Maffi. The document...
...had been authenticated by Cardinal Pietro Maffi, who “compared this leaf with a Galileo autograph letter in his collection”, the university noted
Treasured Galileo manuscript is a forgery, University of Michigan says
Pietro Maffi seems to have been a bit obsessed with Galilei:
His love for science once provoked Pisa's outrage, when Maffi proposed to erect a statue of Galileo Galilei, the scientist condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic.