Oldest Map of The Night Sky Appears Hidden Within Medieval Codex

SPACE19 October 2022

ByCARLY CASSELLA

The parchment from St. Catherine's Monastery showing the tracings of older writings highlighted in yellow. (Museum of the Bible, 2021/CC BY-SA 4.0)

The lost star catalog of Hipparchus – regarded as the earliest known attempt to map the entire night sky – may have just been discovered on parchment preserved at St Catherine's Monastery on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

In 2012, the student of leading biblical scholar Peter Williams noticed something curious behind the lettering of the Christian manuscript he was analyzing at the University of Cambridge.

The student, Jamie Klair, had stumbled across a famous passage in Greek that was often attributed to Eratosthenes; an astronomer and the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria (one of the most prestigious places of learning in the ancient world).

In 2017, multispectral imaging of the document revealed nine folios of pages containing hints of a text that had been written over. It wasn't an unusual finding in itself – parchment was a valuable commodity in centuries gone, so it wasn't uncommon for scholars to scrape old skins for reuse.

Poring over the results in the second year of the pandemic, Williams noticed some odd numbers in the St Catherine's Monastery folios.

When he passed off the page to scientific historians in France, researchers were shocked. Historian Victor Gysembergh from the French national scientific research centre CNRS in Paris told Jo Marchant at Nature that "it was immediately clear we had star coordinates."

Original text from St. Catherine's Monastery over the top of faint tracings discovered by multispectral imaging. (Museum of the Bible/Early Manuscripts Electronic Library/Lazarus Project/University of Rochester/multispectral processing by Keith T. Knox/tracings by Emanuel Zingg)

So how do we know who these coordinates were written by?

The short answer is we don't – at least not with full certainty. What experts do know, however, is that the Greek astronomer, Hipparchus, was working on a star catalog of the western world's sky between 162 and 127 BCE.

Several historical texts refer to Hipparchus as 'the father of astronomy' and credit him with the discovery of how Earth 'wobbles' on its axis in what's now known as a precession. He's also said to be the first to calculate the motions of the Sun and Moon.

Looking at the star map buried behind the text of the St Catherine's Monastery parchments, researchers worked backwards to figure out Earth's precession at the time the map was written. The coordinates of the stars roughly matched the precession expected of our planet around 129 BCE, within Hipparchus' lifetime.

Until this map was found, the oldest known star catalog was put together by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD, three centuries after Hipparchus.

The only other work left by Hipparchus is a commentary on an astronomical poem which describes stellar constellations. Many of the coordinates Hipparchus gave to the stars in his Commentary on the Phaenomena closely match the document from St Catherine's Monastery, though the fragmented text can be difficult to decipher.

Legible coordinates of only one constellation, Corona Borealis, can be recovered from the folios from Egypt, but researchers think it is likely that the entire night sky was mapped by Hipparchus at some point.

Without a telescope, such work would have been extremely challenging and time intensive.

According to the researchers, the hidden passage reads as such:

"Corona Borealis, lying in the northern hemisphere, in length spans 9°¼ from the first degree of Scorpius to 10°¼8 in the same zodiacal sign (i.e. in Scorpius). In breadth it spans 6°¾ from 49° from the North Pole to 55°¾.

Within it, the star (β CrB) to the West next to the bright one (α CrB) leads (i.e. is the first to rise), being at Scorpius 0.5°. The fourth9 star (ι CrB) to the East of the bright one (α CrB) is the last (i.e. to rise) [. . .]10 49° from the North Pole. Southernmost (δ CrB) is the third counting from the bright one (α CrB) towards the East, which is 55°¾ from the North Pole."

The notations match ancient Greek terminology. The term 'length' is based on East-West extension of a constellation, while 'breadth' describes the North-South extension of the constellation.

Compared to Ptolemy's later work, Hipparchus' mathematics appear to be much more reliable, within one degree of what modern astronomers would later find. This suggests Ptolemy did not simply copy Hipparchus' work.

Another manuscript, a Latin translation of the Phaenomena from 8th century AD, shares similar structure and terminology to the Corona Borealis passage, which suggests it is also based on Hipparchus' work.

The constellations mapped in this document are Ursa Major, Ursa Minor and Draco. Again, many of the star's values match what is seen in Hipparchus' Commentary.

Some astronomers had previously suggested that Hipparchus wrote the original coordinates that were cited in these Latin documents, but the discovery of this new text adds further weight to that idea.

"The new fragment makes this much, much clearer," Mathieu Ossendrijver, a historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin, told Nature.

"This star catalog that has been hovering in the literature as an almost hypothetical thing has become very concrete."

Researchers are hopeful that more legible text can be recovered from the monastery's papers in the future.

The study was published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.

Newborn orca is a girl; plays big role in future health of endangered species: DFO

Posted: Oct. 19, 2022
DFO/FACEBOOK
Newborn orca K45 is a girl.


Fisheries and Oceans Canada is revealing the gender of a newborn Southern Resident Killer Whale known to frequent waters around Vancouver Island, saying scientists were able to identify her as a female.

According to the DFO, staff at its Marine Mammal Conservation Program spotted the killer whale calf, or orca, while researching her pod near Swiftsure Bank, located at the entrance to the Juan de Fuca Strait.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, the DFO says the calf, known as K45, is the first born into the K pod group since 2011. She was first spotted in July and is the second calf for K20, or Spock, which first gave birth to K39 in 2004.

“While every new Southern Resident killer whale is celebrated, females are especially important as they are essential to the ongoing and future health of this endangered iconic Pacific species,” the DFO said in its post.


“Welcome to the pod little one!”

The DFO explains that K pod, along with J and L pods, are the only three Southern Resident killer whale pods that remain of the endangered species.

Last month, the Center for Whale Research (CWR) reported a decrease in killer whales after its latest census completed July 1 showed a population of 73 compared to 74 the year before.

READ ALSO: New census shows decrease in Southern Resident killer whale population, despite recent births


The Washington state-based centre said its census marked the lowest L pod count since the study began in 1976, with 32 orcas recorded this year. That’s down from 33 the year before and nearly half the population recorded in 1993 when there were 59.

“K pod sits at its lowest number in the last two decades, at 16 individuals. With no mortalities and a single birth, J pod now totals 25 individuals,” the CRW added.

Transport Canada in April announced measures to protect endangered killer whales, including expanded closures for commercial and recreational salmon fisheries in parts of the Salish Sea where they feed.

 

Bizarre Discovery on Australian Beach Could Be a Ginormous Whale Penis

NATURE19 October 2022

ByTESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS

The mystery chunk of animal flesh that washed up on the beach. (@bootscootinaf/TikTok)

A huge, smooth, pink, severed flesh-tentacle-thing discovered on a quiet island beach in Australia has drawn speculation over what kind of animal is now missing a piece of its anatomy.

The "giant random animal part" was found and filmed by TikTok user Afri Gregory, and has since gone viral with millions of views sparking tons of speculation about whale penises.

"It is massive, look! That's my foot. It's like the size of my leg. Eeew. Disgusting!" Gregory exclaimed in the footage, taken on an island off the coast near Townsville in Queensland.

Macquarie University zoologist Vanessa Pirotta cautions that we don't actually know what the meter and a half of dismembered flesh is.

"It could be anything, from [a] juicy component of a random marine animal, [such as a] shark liver," she told Newsweek. But she does admit that it's shape, size and overall similarities do look comparable to a whale's wang.

Although cetacean skeletons have long since adapted to a life of floating through the ocean, sexual selection has held on to their pelvic bones to give their robust penis muscles something to anchor onto. This gives the marine mammals greater mastery of their penis's flailing, which in turn suggests there's some kind of reproductive advantage to having a greater degree of control.

That dexterous movement has been proposed as an explanation for at least one legendary sea serpents sighting. The crew of the 19th century sailing ship Pauline witnessed what they thought was a sea serpent attack a group of whales in 1875.

While hazy glimpses of whale penises might make for a good hypothesis, there's no reason to think all – or even any – serpent sightings are the result of whale flashings.

Nonetheless, few of us are accustomed to seeing such sights strolling along tropical beaches, so can be excused for stopping and staring.

Being the largest animal known to have existed, blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) naturally also have the most giant of penises in the animal kingdom – averaging about 2.5 to 3 meters (8 to 9.8 feet) long. But the more likely contender, if a penis is indeed what we're looking at on that beach, is a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), as they're currently in the Queensland waters to breed.

Humpback whale mating organs have long been studied by researchers to learn more about the mating habits of the large cetaceans. In 1955, examining whale testicles allowed researchers to conclude that they're seasonal breeders, and the length of a whale's penis can be used as an indicator of how sexually mature the animal is.

A male humpback whale with penis on display. (Pack et al., Aquatic Mammals, 2002)

In 2002, researchers filmed 121 hours of 630 different humpback whale pods, capturing 13 instances of whale erections. From this they concluded most penis extrusions occurred during male contests for dominance. But humpback's are baleen whales – they don't have teeth – so a rival or spurned lover could not have done such damage to a whale's erection.

This study also found lone males can extend themselves while singing for company. So, perhaps the recent discovery on the Australian beach originated from one such lonely male, who had the misfortune of doing his sexy song fatally close to a predator such as an orca.

Unless an expert goes out to examine the remains in person, however, it will remain a mystery how this giant chunk of severed ocean flesh came to be in its current resting place, or to what it actually belongs to.

"If anything, it provides an opportunity for people to learn more about whale reproduction or other juicy components of animals that might wash ashore," Pirotta told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"I can see why people are interested right around the world, but we just don't know" what the fleshy member even is, Pirotta said.