St Catherine's Monastery on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula may be where the lost star catalog of Hipparchus was found.
The student of leading biblical scholar Peter Williams noticed something strange behind the lettering of the Christian manuscript he was analyzing.
One of the most prestigious places of learning in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria, is often attributed to Eratosthenes, an astronomer and the chief librarian.
Nine pages contained hints of a text that had been written over. It wasn't unusual for scholars to reuse old skins when they were worth a lot of money in the past.
The results of the second year of the Pandemic were pored over by Williams.
Researchers were shocked when he left the page. It was immediately clear that we had star coordinates, according to a historian from the French national scientific research centre.
We don't know who wrote the coordinates.
We don't, at least not with complete certainty. Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer, worked on a star catalog of the western world's sky between 161 and 127 BC.
Hipparchus is credited with the discovery of how Earth wobbles on its axis in what is now called a precession. He is said to be the first to calculate the motions of the sun and moon.
Researchers looked at the star map buried behind the text of the St Catherine's Monastery to figure out when the precession began. The precession expected of our planet was roughly matched by the coordinates of the stars.
The oldest star catalog was put together by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.
Hipparchus' only other work is a commentary on an astronomer's poem. The coordinates Hipparchus gave to the stars in his commentary are very similar to the document from St Catherine's Monastery.
The entire night sky is thought to have been mapped by Hipparchus at some point, but legible coordinates of only one constellation can be recovered.
Without a telescope, such work would have taken a long time to complete.
The hidden passage reads as such.
"Corona Borealis, lying in the northern hemisphere, in length spans 9°¼ from the first degree of Scorpius to 10°¼8 in the same zodiacal sign (i.e. in Scorpius). In breadth it spans 6°¾ from 49° from the North Pole to 55°¾.
Within it, the star (β CrB) to the West next to the bright one (α CrB) leads (i.e. is the first to rise), being at Scorpius 0.5°. The fourth9 star (ι CrB) to the East of the bright one (α CrB) is the last (i.e. to rise) [. . .]10 49° from the North Pole. Southernmost (δ CrB) is the third counting from the bright one (α CrB) towards the East, which is 55°¾ from the North Pole."
The terminology is similar to ancient Greek terminology. The North-South extension of the constellation is referred to as thebreadth.
Hipparchus' mathematics seem to be more reliable than Ptolemy's work. Ptolemy may not have simply copied Hipparchus' work.
The Latin translation of the Phaenomena from 8th century AD is similar to the one Hipparchus wrote.
There are three constellations in this document. Many of the star's values are similar to what is seen in the commentary.
The discovery of this new text adds more weight to the idea that Hipparchus wrote the original coordinates.
Matthieu Ossendrijver, a historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin, told Nature that the new fragment makes this much more clear.
The star catalog that has been hovering in the literature has become very concrete.
More legible text can be found in the monastery's papers.
The journal for the history of astronomy published the study.
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