Rare discovery in Egypt: Part of the map of the heavens made by the astronomer Hipparchus was found

Rare and important, scientists describe the discovery under a medieval parchment in the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai in Egypt: a part of what is believed to be lost star catalog of the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, the world’s first attempt at a complete “mapping” of the night sky.

Scientists have been searching for the work of Hipparchus for centuries. The scientific publication was made in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, according to Nature. The find proves that Hipparchus, considered the most important astronomer of ancient Greece, had indeed made a “map” of the heavens several centuries before anything similar was attempted.

The parchment belonged to the Monastery of St. Catherine, but most of its 146 leaves are now in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington. The parchment contains the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts from the 10th or 11th century. The codex is a palimpsest, meaning an older text was written underneath, reports the APE-MPE.

The paragraph in Greek

Until today the only star catalog that had survived from antiquity was his astronomer Ptolemy in Alexandria, Egypt during the 2nd century AD. His Almagest (or Mathematical Syntax) was one of the most influential scientific texts in history, presenting a geocentric mathematical model of the Universe that had been widely accepted for over 1,200 years. Ptolemy had, among other things, given the coordinates of more than 1,000 stars.

But in the ancient texts there are many references that the first who had made such stellar measurements was Hipparchus of Rhodes (190-120 BC) three centuries ago. Earlier the Babylonian astronomers had measured the positions of some stars but only around the Zodiac, while Hipparchus was the first to determine the positions of the stars using two coordinates and attempted to create a “map” of the entire night sky.

“This list of stars, which until now was floating around in the texts as almost something hypothetical, has now become something very concrete,” said the historian of astronomy Matthieu Ossendriever of the Free University of Berlin reports APE-MPE.

Researchers believe that Hipparchus’ original list, like Ptolemy’s, would have included observations of almost every visible star in the sky. Lacking a telescope, Hipparchus probably used some other observational instrument such as a diopter, and would certainly have “spent endless hours of work,” according to Gieseberg.

The Hipparchus-Ptolemy relationship has always been a murky issue. Some experts have gone so far as to claim that Hipparchus’ star catalog never existed, while others – first and foremost the 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe – have countered that Ptolemy simply stole Hipparchus’ pre-existing measurements and passed them off as his own. . The analysis of the revealed text on the parchment so far has led the researchers to the initial conclusion that Ptolemy did not simply copy Hipparchus’ data. On the other hand, as they pointed out, Hipparchus’ numbers for the positions of the stars (with a deviation of at most one degree from the actual ones) are much more accurate than those of Ptolemy’s successor.

The work of Ptolemy is a landmark

According to the historian of astronomy James Evans of the American University of Puget Sound, the discovery “it enriches our picture of Hipparchus and gives us a fascinating idea of ​​what he really did.” As he said, his work was decisive because it was a milestone for the “mathematicization of Nature”, i.e. the shift from the simple description of natural phenomena to their measurement, calculation and prediction.

Hipparchus had criticized his predecessors in astronomy for not caring about numerical precision. According to Evans, Hipparchus took advantage of the Babylonian tradition of precise astronomical mathematical observations and thanks to him the “marriage” with the Greek geometrical tradition took place, with the result that “this is how modern astronomy really began”.

Researchers hope that as imaging techniques improve, they will discover other star coordinates in the Code, several parts of which have yet to be read. They also consider it possible that additional pages of Hipparchus’ star catalog survive in the library of St. Catherine of Sinai, which contains more than 160 palimpsests. Related research has already brought to light unknown ancient Greek medical texts under the Christian ones.