Fabled star catalogue by ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus had been feared lost.
The library of St Catherine Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt yielded a palimpsest containing stellar coordinates by Hipparchus.A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.
The older writing was thought to contain further Christian texts and, in 2012, biblical scholar Peter Williams at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked his students to study the pages as a summer project. One of them, Jamie Klair, unexpectedly spotted a passage in Greek often attributed to the astronomer Eratosthenes. In 2017, the pages were re-analysed using state-of-the-art multispectral imaging.
The surviving passage, deciphered by Gysembergh and his colleague Emmanuel Zingg at Sorbonne University in Paris, is about a page long. It states the length and breadth in degrees of the constellation Corona Borealis, the northern crown, and gives coordinates for the stars at its extreme north, south, east and west.
“This star catalogue that has been hovering in the literature as an almost hypothetical thing has become very concrete.”The researchers think that Hipparchus’s original list, like Ptolemy’s, would have included observations of nearly every visible star in the sky. Without a telescope, says Gysembergh, he must have used a sighting tube, known as a dioptra, or a mechanism called an armillary sphere. “It represents countless hours of work.
Hipparchus was the pivotal figure responsible for “turning astronomy into a predictive science”, agrees Ossendrijver. In his only surviving work, Hipparchus criticized earlier astronomical writers for not caring about numerical accuracy in their visions of orbits and celestial spheres.
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First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchmentFabled star catalogue by ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus had been feared lost.
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