Ancient Astronomical Atlas Unveiled
Dan Vergano, USA TODAY, 1/12/05
An ancient star atlas lost for centuries and a cutting-edge atlas of the modern universe were unveiled Tuesday by scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
Hidden in plain sight for centuries, the star atlas was found on a statue in Italy's National Museum of Archaeology in Naples. Called the Farnese Atlas, the 7-foot-tall marble statue depicts one of the titans of Greek mythology, Atlas, holding a 2-foot-wide globe on his shoulders. The sphere is covered with 41 star constellations, from Aries the Ram to Andromeda.
"Here we have a real case where lost, ancient wisdom has been found," says astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Inscribed on the Farnese Atlas, he reports, is the lost star catalogue of Hipparchus, one of the great Greek astronomers who lived around 140 B.C. on the island of Rhodes. No copies of the atlas, a standard reference for ancient astronomers, exist today.
But the star positions on the statue date to 150 B.C., give or take 55 years, and match those mentioned in a surviving book of commentary by Hipparchus, Schaefer says.
The link between the statue and Hipparchus was suspected by art historians. But Schaefer was the first to precisely plot the constellations on the stone globe."It's amazing what (Schaefer) has done," Harvard science historian Owen Gingerich says.
On the modern front, two sky survey teams reveal they have seen the imprint of sound waves left over from the Big Bang in the arrangement of galaxies in today's universe. The findings match patterns reported in 2003 by other scientists studying the so-called cosmic microwave radiation, heat left over from 350,000 years after the universe's birth 13.7 billion years ago:
* In a survey of 46,000 galaxies spread across 10% of the sky, Sloan Digital Sky Survey scientists report that many galaxies are 500 million light-years apart, as predicted by the 2003 findings.
* In a separate map of 220,000 galaxies, a team of British and Australian scientists reports that only 18% of the matter in galaxies is normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people. The rest, as predicted, appears to be"dark matter," a more exotic accumulation of physics particles found in haloes around galaxies.
The results paint a picture of the universe coalescing out of the Big Bang, cooling and spreading into galaxies whose structure was determined by sound waves reverberating in the cosmic fireball.
An ancient star atlas lost for centuries and a cutting-edge atlas of the modern universe were unveiled Tuesday by scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting.
Hidden in plain sight for centuries, the star atlas was found on a statue in Italy's National Museum of Archaeology in Naples. Called the Farnese Atlas, the 7-foot-tall marble statue depicts one of the titans of Greek mythology, Atlas, holding a 2-foot-wide globe on his shoulders. The sphere is covered with 41 star constellations, from Aries the Ram to Andromeda.
"Here we have a real case where lost, ancient wisdom has been found," says astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Inscribed on the Farnese Atlas, he reports, is the lost star catalogue of Hipparchus, one of the great Greek astronomers who lived around 140 B.C. on the island of Rhodes. No copies of the atlas, a standard reference for ancient astronomers, exist today.
But the star positions on the statue date to 150 B.C., give or take 55 years, and match those mentioned in a surviving book of commentary by Hipparchus, Schaefer says.
The link between the statue and Hipparchus was suspected by art historians. But Schaefer was the first to precisely plot the constellations on the stone globe."It's amazing what (Schaefer) has done," Harvard science historian Owen Gingerich says.
On the modern front, two sky survey teams reveal they have seen the imprint of sound waves left over from the Big Bang in the arrangement of galaxies in today's universe. The findings match patterns reported in 2003 by other scientists studying the so-called cosmic microwave radiation, heat left over from 350,000 years after the universe's birth 13.7 billion years ago:
* In a survey of 46,000 galaxies spread across 10% of the sky, Sloan Digital Sky Survey scientists report that many galaxies are 500 million light-years apart, as predicted by the 2003 findings.
* In a separate map of 220,000 galaxies, a team of British and Australian scientists reports that only 18% of the matter in galaxies is normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people. The rest, as predicted, appears to be"dark matter," a more exotic accumulation of physics particles found in haloes around galaxies.
The results paint a picture of the universe coalescing out of the Big Bang, cooling and spreading into galaxies whose structure was determined by sound waves reverberating in the cosmic fireball.