An international team of scientists was able to decipher astronomical observations dating back to the Greek scientist Hipparchus, after being kept secret for centuries under layers of rewritten texts, using an “advanced particle accelerator” at a national laboratory in the United States.
This discovery was made inside a historical manuscript known as the “Codex Climaci Rescriptus”, which is a “palimpsest” text dating back to the period between the fifth and tenth centuries AD, where the original texts were erased and reused to write new content, a common practice in ancient times due to the scarcity of parchments and their high cost.
An astronomical legacy that precedes telescopes:
Before the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, Greek astronomers relied on naked-eye observations to understand the movement of stars and planets. Hipparchus is considered one of the most prominent pioneers in this field, having compiled “one of the most accurate catalogs of stars in the ancient world,” which was long thought to be completely lost.
But in 2021, researchers noticed constellation names and astronomical measurements obscured beneath later texts in the manuscript, prompting them to use sophisticated imaging techniques to recover them.
Victor Gesemberg, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said: “The importance of this catalog for understanding the origins of science prompted us to use the utmost technology.”
A particle accelerator that revives the past:
The team relied on a “synchrotron-type particle accelerator” at SLAC National Laboratory in California, where charged particles are accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light, producing high-intensity and precision X-rays.
These rays allowed for the detection of subtle differences between the inks used in different eras. Although the original text was erased, the older ink left behind a calcium-rich residue, enabling scientists to “re-draw hidden letters and words.”
Gesemberg stressed that the quality of the images obtained “far exceeds any previous attempts to re-read erased texts.”
A new window on “the birth of science”:
The extracted text is still under careful analysis, but the researchers confirmed that they were already able to read clear parts of astronomical data from the initial results. The team expects that, once the study is complete, the manuscript will provide “the most complete historical record of Hipparchus’ sightings known to date.”
Scientists believe that this discovery not only sheds light on the history of astronomy, but also represents an important step in understanding “the first beginnings of the scientific method” in human civilization.
