Some 2,200 years ago, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus helped establish a new way of understanding the motions of the stars that persists to this day
, originally written by the Greek poet Aratus in the 3rd century B.C. The poem, along with the accompanying star coordinates, had been erased from a reused medieval parchment and was recovered only through multispectral imaging, which uses different wavelengths of light to highlight the removed text.
Hipparchus was likely influenced by the earlier work of Babylonian astronomers, who measured the distances of certain constellations from the ecliptic. By tracking the movements of these zodiac constellations—the constellations that sit in a part of the sky that the sun moves through over the course of the year—the Babylonians could measure the seasons and predict astronomical events such as eclipses.
The recent study compared the newly discovered coordinates to the values found in other sources, and they generally agreed, though some discrepancies exist, perhaps the result of different measurements or changes as the figures were transcribed through the ages.The text with Hipparchus’ star coordinates is in a palimpsest, which is a document that has been written on and erased multiple times, with traces of removed writing often still detectable. It’s part of the 10th- or 11th-century A.D.
Hipparchus may have been amused by this, as he was also the first scientist to describe the motion of precession.
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