Technology may have revealed a piece of the long-lost works of Greek astronomer Hipparchus, one of the greatest astronomers of antiquity.
© Peter MalikHistorians have found what appears to be a piece of an ancient star catalog in a folio from the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, shown here.
Around 130 BC, the great Greek astronomer
Hipparchus drew up the very first star catalog ever, containing descriptions and coordinates of some 850 naked-eye stars in the northern sky.
At least, that's what later sources say - copies of Hipparchus's list have never been found. Until now, that is. Writing in the
Journal of the History of Astronomy,
three European scientists claim to have uncovered a small part of the long-lost catalog. "I felt nothing short of awe when I first heard about it," says astronomy historian and writer William Sheehan.
In the 2nd century AD, Claudius Ptolemy compiled a catalog of 1,025 stars in 48 constellations to include in his magnum opus,
Almagest. Ptolemy also hinted at the existence of an earlier listing, some scholars have suggested that Ptolemy's work was based not on his own observations but on Hipparchus's catalog.
Hipparchus was born around 190 BC in Nicaea, in what is now northwestern Turkey, but he carried out most of his astronomical work on the island of Rhodes. He made the first estimates of the distances and sizes of the Moon and the Sun, and was the first to discover
precession: the slow wobble in the orientation of the Earth's spin axis. According to astronomy historian Bradley Schaefer (Louisiana State University), Hipparchus was "arguably the best and greatest astronomer in the world before Copernicus."
"Only one of his many books,
The Commentaries, has survived," says Schaefer, "with the most important loss being his influential star catalog." That's why scientists are elated about the new find. "It [...] illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them," astronomy historian James Evans (University of Puget Sound, Washington) told
Nature.
Peter Williams (Cambridge University, UK) and Victor Gysembergh and Emmanuel Zingg (Sorbonne University, Paris) studied the
Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a 9th- or 10th-century manuscript from the Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai peninsula in Egypt. The codex, which is now kept at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., contains Christian texts in Syriac.
Comment: A variety of unusual and unexplained phenomena has been appearing in our skies in recent years, with other, formerly rare, activity increasing in both frequency and intensity. Taken together, it's clear that there is a great shift afoot on our planet, part of which is reflected in our changing, cooling, atmosphere: