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Ancient astronomers were highly sophisticated observers of the night sky. Though they lacked telescopes or any kind of magnification device, stargazing is i of the simply things you could do at night, particularly if your spouse was tired and the kitchen slave let the fire die. V of the eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — were well-known to ancient astronomers.

Now, a new discovery suggests that the ancient Babylonians didn't just track the planets — they used geometric methods that foreshadowed the evolution of calculus to accurately model how far Jupiter traveled over a lx-mean solar day menses. Upwardly until now, Europeans in the late-Medieval period (1300s) were thought to be the beginning astronomers to utilise this blazon of model.

Babylonian trapezoid

The time-velocity graph described in the cuneiform tablets accurately models how Jupiter'southward displacement changes over time. The planet's motility appears to slow from Earth before finally pausing and reversing course.

While we knew ancient Babylonians had a thorough understanding of geometry, this is the showtime fourth dimension we've seen it applied to astronomy. Mathieu Ossendrijver, of Humboldt University, put the pieces of the ancient puzzle together by combining the information on four tablets housed in the British Museum with a photo of a tablet fragment given him by an Assyriologist. This 5th tablet fragment was tiny, at roughly two inches by ii inches, just it proved critical to deciphering the puzzle.

By comparing the information on the fifth tablet against the data on the other four, Ossendrijver discovered that the 5 tablets described a method of calculating the altitude Jupiter had traveled over time. Most ancient astronomers had exhaustive charts and tables that described the position of planets relative to one another based on the fourth dimension of yr. The idea of describing a planet'south movement over time every bit a geometric shape, in which the space under the curve equals the altitude traveled, was unheard of at the time.

The fifth tablet fragment

The 5th tablet fragment

Little is known nearly why the Babylonians developed geometric astronomy, and the tablets contain no data on their motivations. Ane matter we do know is that the planet Jupiter was associated with Marduk, the caput of the Babylonian pantheon of gods. It's possible that the calculations were related to a ceremony or religious rite. Simply it's impossible to know what motivated these ancient astronomers to brand an enormous intellectual leap from describing the motions of planets relative to each other to deriving the distances they traveled over time by using geometry.