Hipparchus of Nicaea, also called Hipparchus, He was an astronomer who lived between 190 and 120 BC in present-day Turkey and Greece. To his credit is the creation of the first known star map: a group of scientists found the oldest copy, hidden in the library of the St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Egypt.
The so-called Catalog of Stars of Hipparchus of Nicaea came to the present day by pieces, thanks to the monastic work of its reproduction.
But the researchers, led by Victor Gysenbergh, They found an ancient transcript, from the fifth or sixth century, in the Monastery of Saint Catherine of Mount Sinai, built between the years 527 and 565 of our era.
Nine of the 146 sheets that the scientists found contained material related to astronomy.
They are also in the documents the myths about the origin of the stars, of Eratosthenes, parts of a famous poem written in the 3rd century BC.
The use of technology for the discovery of the star map of Hipparchus of Nicaea
Gysembergh and his colleagues, such as Peter Williams and Emanuel Zingg, published their finding in the Journal for the History of Astronomy portal, last October 18. Its titled New evidence for the Hipparchus Star Catalog, revealed by multispectral imaging.
This type of photography captures images of things that cannot be easily seen by the human eye, capturing light of a narrow range of wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum.
The scientists used multispectral imaging, that revealed the details about the original scroll. The codex found is a palimpsest, so other texts were written on top of the originals.
The group led by Gysembergh did not notice Hipparchus’s star map until he delved into the technology, allowing the discovery.
BGR highlights that it is believed to be the map of Hipparchus (Hipparchus) because the coordinates of the document correspond to a time in which he would have been working, around the year 129 BC. It is not signed by its author, so only guesses are made about it.