file Babylonian astronomers tracked Jupiter, around 350BC

8 years 2 months ago #3863 by retro78
Babylonian astronomers tracked Jupiter

Ancient Babylonian astronomers developed many important concepts that are still in use, including the division of the sky into 360 degrees. They could also predict the positions of the planets using arithmetic. Ossendrijver translated several Babylonian cuneiform tablets from 350 to 50 BCE and found that they contain a sophisticated calculation of the position of Jupiter. The method relies on determining the area of a trapezium under a graph. This technique was previously thought to have been invented at least 1400 years later in 14th-century Oxford. This surprising discovery changes our ideas about how Babylonian astronomers worked and may have influenced Western science.

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Source : science.sciencemag.org
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8 years 2 months ago - 8 years 2 months ago #3866 by Todd
I guess those cylinder seals were accurate. They likely tracked a majority of the solar system at least 3,150 years earlier then that.
Last edit: 8 years 2 months ago by Todd. Reason: clarified with add sentence

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