There is a fragment of the oldest star map.
Hipparchus is thought to have made the first known attempt to chart the entire night sky in the second century B.C. The Codex Climaci Rescriptus is located at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula.
The original writings of the codex have been removed to make room for a collection of Christian Palestinian Aramaic texts. The researchers thought that the Christian texts were hidden beneath the pages, but they found out that they were. The researchers published their findings in the journal.
A science historian at the French National Center for Scientific Research told Nature that he was excited from the beginning. We had star coordinates.
The world's first computer was unlocked by scientists.
The researchers were excited when they were able to estimate the date when the coordinates were written down.
Hipparchus spent a lot of his later years on the island of Rhodes. Historical texts credit him with a number of impressive scientific advances, such as accurately modeling the motions of the sun and the moon, and possibly inventing the astrolabe, a handheld disc.
A new star appeared in the night sky in a patch of previously empty space.
The movement of this star in its line of radiance led him to wonder if the stars that we think to be fixed are also moving. He dared to schedule the stars for the future and then tick off the heavenly bodies by name in a list.
Hipparchus cataloged 850 stars across the night sky. Hipparchus realized that the distant stars had moved 2 degrees from their original positions when he compared his complete star chart with some of the individual stars that had been taken.
Earth was wobbling on its axis at a rate of 1 degree every 72 years. Hipparchus' catalog is engraved on the globe atop the Farnese Atlas, but it had been lost until now.
The researchers took 42 photographs of each of the nine pages across a broad range of wavelength before using computers to pick out the text hidden underneath. The scholars used the same idea of Earth's planetary precession that had sprung from the chart to identify it. The stars of the Corona Borealis were wound back to the year when they shone in the sky at the spot hidden.
The researchers were able to confirm that the Aratus manuscript's coordinates for the constellations were also found in the wound-back night sky.
The historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin told Nature that the new fragment made this much more clear. The star catalog that has been hovering in the literature has become very concrete.
The researchers want to improve their techniques and use more of the codex. Steve Green's Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. is home to most of the manuscript's 146 folios, which are currently owned by the American billionaire.
The more than 160 palimpsests at St. Catherine's Monastery may contain additional pages from the star catalog. Past efforts have led to the discovery of previously unknown Greek medical texts, which include surgical instructions, recipes for drugs and guides to Medicial Plants.
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