A Fabled Map of the Cosmos Lost for Thousands of Years Has Been Found

A long-lost star map that is enormously important in the history of science has been discovered in the time-worn pages of a Medieval manuscript after a search that has spanned nearly 2,000 years, according to a new study.

Compiled by the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who lived during the 2nd century B.C., the legendary star catalog marks the first attempt to record accurate positions of celestial objects with fixed coordinates. Like many ancient documents, copies of the catalog were lost in the centuries after it was written, and it is only known from references to it in later works. The mystery of its disappearance has prompted a search for the catalog that dates back nearly 2,000 years.

Now, a team led by Victor Gysembergh, a professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), reports that passages of Hipparchus’ Star Catalog have been discovered underneath the text of a Christian manuscript that originated from Egypt’s Saint Catherine’s Monastery, and is now mostly housed at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

The “new evidence is the most authoritative to date and allows major progress in the reconstruction of Hipparchus’ Star Catalog,” according to a study published on Tuesday in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.

“Hipparchus’ Star Catalog is the very first attempt in human history to precisely measure the positions of the fixed stars,” Gysembergh said in an email. “It is a major milestone in the birth of science as a collective endeavor to measure and predict our surroundings.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akey3e/hipparchus-star-catalog-found