Hipparchus’s map of the stars may finally have been found

A trio of researchers from CNRS, UMR, Tyndale Home and Sorbonne Université, respectively, have discovered what could be the well-known Hipparchus’s map of the celebs. Of their paper printed in Journal for the Historical past of Astronomy, Victor Gysembergh, Peter Williams and Emanuel Zingg describe a palimpsest manuscript that was discovered on the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula, and what they imagine it describes.

Historians have lengthy believed {that a} catalog of the celebs was created way back by early Greek astronomer Hipparchus—his catalog was believed to signify the earliest map of the celebs. However lack of bodily proof of such a map has left the file for creation of the earliest star map to Ptolemy. On this new effort, the researchers imagine they’ve discovered a part of the catalog that Hipparchus created someday between 162 and 127 BCE.

The work started with research of a palimpsest manuscript that was initially discovered on the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery and is now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The crew famous that the fabric on which the textual content had been printed was written over textual content that had been scraped away, permitting for reuse—a typical follow throughout the interval. Intrigued, one of many crew members requested a bunch of scholars to see if they might make out any of the prior textual content. Certainly one of them, Jamie Klair, discovered what seemed to be a line of textual content that had beforehand been seen in work by Eratosthenes, an astronomer.

Subsequent, satisfied that the subtext could have significance, the manuscript was despatched to Early Manuscripts Digital Library, the place it was scanned utilizing a wide range of lighting methods. The researchers had been in a position to get better most of what had been erased. The overwritten textual content described the positions of a number of constellations and different star positions. By utilizing precession (the quantity of Earth’s wobble), the crew was in a position to confirm not solely the precision of the star coordinates however the dates that the measurements had been taken. They discovered the coordinates to be fairly exact—extra so than the work by Ptolemy. And the date that the mapping had taken place was 129 BCE.

The researchers conclude that their analysis of the manuscript very strongly suggests it was created by Hipparchus and that it represents the oldest star map identified to exist.

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