Fragments of a star catalog from the second century B.C. have turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over centuries later. A new analysis of the religious manuscript shows that the hidden text is probably from the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, whose map of the stars — thought to be the first attempt to map the entire sky — has long been considered lost.
“I think this lays to rest doubts about the existence of Hipparchus’ catalog” and confirms that he was “trying to measure coordinates for all of the visible stars,” says Victor Gysembergh, a historian of ancient science at CNRS in Paris. He and his colleagues reported the discovery in the November Journal for the History of Astronomy.
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