While search over photos of an ancient ms during the COVID-19 lockdown , a historian discovered what is thought to be the oldest known mathematical function of the stars hidden beneath a medieval Christian school text . The map may in fact be the study of Greek astronomer Hipparchus ( 190 - 120 BCE ) , who map the stars 100 before any other known attempts , and whose long - lost Star Catalogue has been searched for for centuries .
The ms was found in the Greek Orthodox St Catherine ’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula , Egypt , and contained Syriac texts from the 10th-11th centuries ( now have by Washington DC’sMuseum of the Bible ) . However , the texts had been compose on parchment that had been scraped clean and reprocess , known as a palimpsest , and underneath was thought to arrest honest-to-goodness Christian text edition .
In 2012 , Dr Peter Williams of the University of Cambridge set his student the project of studying the Page . While looking through the texts , one pupil ascertain a transition in Greek , which is often attributed to astronomer and polymathEratosthenes .
A montage showing palimpsest under normal lighting, multipsectral analysis, and a reconstrcution of the hidden text. Image credit: Museum of the Bible CC BY-SA 4.0, photo by Early Manuscripts Electronic Library/Lazarus Project, University of Rochester; multispectral processing by Keith T. Knox; tracings by Emanuel Zingg
While looking through photo of the text – which was found to hold myths explaining the origin of the genius by Eratosthenes written down in the fifth or sixth centuries – Williams noticed a part of the book that made him contact expert at the French National Scientific Research Centre ( CNRS ) in Paris . It appeared he had found ancient star co-ordinate .
As the satellite coggle slightly on its axis as it spin ( in about a26,000 - year cycleknown as precession ) , the way the stars appear in the Nox sky shift by about 1 degree every 75 years . This means that by using modern mapping of the night sky and modeling backward , the researchers were able to see when the initial notice were made . The team found that the coordinates of the star provide burst that of around 129 BCE when Hipparchus was working . This method of locate the clock time of the star map is especially pleasing , as it was Hipparchus himself whodiscovered precedency .
bookman have been searching for Hipparchus ’s Star Catalogue for centuries . Ancient texts reference Hipparchus map out the stars , but no previous transcriptions of this study had been found , with some suggest that it may not have existed . Everyone ’s favorite astronomer ( defend me)Tycho Brahesuggested that Ptolemy had steal Hipparchus ' oeuvre , before give way on toaccuse Ptolemy of fabricating other observations .
The squad believes that Colorado - ordinates for several major constellation found in later piece of work must have arrive from Hipparchus too , but that the grounds suggests Ptolemy had not steal Hipparchus ' Colorado - ordinates , largely because Hipparchus ' study was a heap more accurate than Ptolemy ’s .
“ The new fragment makes this much , much clearer , ” state Mathieu Ossendrijver , a historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin , inNature . “ This Star Catalogue that has been levitate in the literature as an almost hypothetical matter has become very concrete . ”
The team hop that the imagery technique will be used on further texts , include the thousands of other reused parchments in libraries around Europe , perhaps let out more star coordinate to study .
The study was publish in theJournal for the History of Astronomy .
