Parts of a Legendary Star Catalogue Finally Found Hiding In Ancient Text

oh wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be talking about something slightly different we're going to talk about I guess to some extent history of astronomy based on a very recent discovery coming from this paper that as always you can find in the description below the paper on the discovery of what seems to be the oldest and possibly the most accurate ancient star catalog that we've always known about but have never actually seen it's only been mentioned by other authors hundreds or even thousands of years later but the catalog created by a person that's actually kind of iconic in terms of what that person created and how this person influenced mathematics but more importantly influenced astronomy to some extent we're actually going to be talking about the catalog created by the father of astronomy the famous hipparcos an ancient Greek astronomer who like so many other of his contemporaries was way ahead of time and coming up with so many incredible theories and so many ideas but before we discuss him and his catalog in more detail I actually wanted to make a relatively important important clarification in regards to what we usually refer to as hipparchos catalog today it's actually a catalog that's available online and it's a high Precision catalog that contains approximately 120 000 different stars and was originally published back in 1997. and this catalog was created by collecting data from the hipparco satellite that you see right here which in this case was a European Space Agency Mission launched in 1989 and retired in 1993 with the main mission being very simple the precise astrometry measurements of as many stars as possible located in the nearby space in case you forgot what astrometry is it's essentially the measurements of tiny motions of the Stars by looking at how they wobble and how they move around which can then be used to measure distances to them but can also be then used to potentially discover planets orbiting around them as well and hipparcos in this case back in 1989 was the first such Mission ever and all of the successes from this Mission led to the development and the creation of the iconic guy at all scope that's now been collecting even more data reviewing billions of different objects in a process but that's beside the point because the main point here is that these are space catalogs of different stars or different bright objects and on this particular name is actually an acronym for high Precision Parallax collecting satellite in reality it's basically named after Greek astronomer hipparchos of nicaea the person who is considered to be the founder of trigonometry which as experienced from being a math teacher tells me is the most disliked part of math but he nevertheless developed it and was the first to use it in lots and lots of different practical cases for example he was able to use it to precisely measure equinoxes he was also the first to measure extremely accurate motions of the sun motions of various objects in the night skies being the first to develop actual reliable methods to predict solar eclipses in this case of course using trigonometry as a solution with all this being done approximately 2200 years ago somewhere between 120 and 170 BC he was also the first to ever discover Earth's recession basically the axle shifts as Earth spins around and moves around the solar system as well as potentially invent astrolab the ancient astronomical instrument that was widely used throughout Middle Ages and during the age of Discovery and so it was most likely using this particular instrument that he was then able to conduct first astrometrical observations of various distant stars in a process compiling the first ever catalog of approximately 850 stars with extremely accurate positions extremely accurate brightness using the scale that we still use today and essentially laid the foundation and the groundwork for the ideas and the signs that we still use today 2200 years later but we actually know about all of this only from this book written 300 years later written by the Claudius pilmi A very popular Greek who very likely found access to some of the earlier hypocrisy's writings and then added a few more stars of his own to officially create a new catalog that included approximately 1 000 stars in this case providing the location relatively accurate coordinates and of course brightness but his measurements were not very accurate as a matter of fact there were quite a lot of Errors some historians have even suggested that maybe he only had very surface understanding of a lot of the math behind this and he might have only really been kind of a copying and paraphrasing a lot of work from hipparcus himself I mean I'm not saying he plagiarized hipparcos but he might have not entirely understood all of the math involved nevertheless Ptolemy is still famous even today for a lot of other reasons as well but they're definitely quite a lot of mistakes in a lot of his other ideas and a lot of his other calculations too for example he is known for his geocentric model and in this case this is the model you see right here where the Earth is in the center and the Moon is the second planet from the center itself and this was of course a widely accepted model during the Latin Middle Ages but we know today that he was completely off here as well and so in that sense the most important part from my guest is the fact that it tells us about the existence of hipparcos and his super accurate catalog but the problem is we've never seen it no one has ever seen it until now small fragments of his star catalog have been recently discovered by the researchers who wrote this paper that discovered unusual writing in ancient Greek using multi-spectral Imaging methods written underneath the medieval religious text in other words by scanning through these Pages they discovered that there was another writing on top of the manuscript originally with the analysis later reconstructing the actual letters realizing that this is very likely the Lost astronomical catalog created by hipparcos himself which in terms of historical value or at least history of astronomy is absolutely mind-blowing this is literally the first letters ever of the first official astronomer the father of astronomy himself and the writing itself is inside of this codex clemasi rescaptus that contains ancient Christian writing and someone unfortunately now belongs to a private collector it's actually part of what's known as the Museum of the Bible but has entirely private ownership and this of course implies that some of the early Christians most likely found the hipparcos catalog but then basically erased his writing or at least tried to erase it and then tried to use this manuscript to copy some of the religious texts something that was actually pretty common because manuscripts were kind of expensive and kind of rare and so if they found something that was useless or not pertaining to their own religion it would make sense that they would actually try to destroy it and use the Recycled manuscript for their own writing afterwards this was actually very common and it's known as Pelham zest but I guess the natural question here is what exactly does this say well it seems to pinpoint the exact location of several stars and the most important Discovery from this particular fragment is that it seems that polumi's star catalog is not just a copy of hipparcus because she's observations of the stars that he looked at had very different coordinates compared to what this has and actually Ptolemy in this case was incorrect here the scientists were able to decipher four different constellations from hippar's Star catalog that seem to provide the observations of stars to the nearest degree way way more accurate than the one from Ptolemy which one second confirms that this wonderful person was way way ahead of his time way more precise and way more accurate than anyone before him or even many people after him and here's what the actual text says in English which basically describes four different stars with pretty accurate description in degrees if you speak Greek here's the Greek version now I'm not going to read this and you can actually pause and read this if you want to mostly because it doesn't really say anything particularly specific just coordinates but the important part here is that he was super accurate and he was way ahead of time and sometimes it makes me wonder if the ancient Greece kept advancing and wasn't conquered by the Roman Empire which then fell apart and which then led to the Dark Ages if we kept going and advancing would we by now have become some kind of a Interstellar species I mean it's a pretty big if but the stuff that the ancient Greeks were doing is way way ahead of anyone else even compared to scientists that lived 2 000 years afterwards it wasn't until the 20th century that we actually finally started to understand what's going on here and make more accurate observations and predictions so yeah something to think about but on that note well that's pretty much it I guess it's a bit of a history lesson slash incredible Discovery for the history of astronomy but other than that that's it thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else so policy only joined by junior membership or by buying the wonderful presentation you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] [Music] thank you thank you foreign

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 135,506

Keywords: hipparchus, father of astronomy, first star catalogue, hipparchus star catalogue, ancient star catalogue, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, earth nature, earth day, nature earth, biodiversity, history of astronomy, ancient greece, ancient greek, ancient greek astronomy, ancient stars, catalogue of stars, discovery of astronomy

Id: ktzxaTotw-w

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022