An ancient astronomer's observations of a 1,000-year-old supernova have just been unearthed

[Judi Lynn]

An ancient astronomer's observations of a 1,000-year-old supernova have just been unearthed

A blast from the past.

JOSH HRALA
29 APR 2016

If you think about it, astronomers haven’t been studying the skies for very long. The first telescope was invented in 1608, based on an early patent by Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey, and while that seems like a long time ago, it’s nothing compared to the age of humanity or - on a much larger scale - the Universe.

But just because our ancestors lacked the ability to fully study objects in space, doesn’t mean they ignored the events taking place in the sky. In fact, when researchers today want to study events that happened long ago, they often turn to ancient astronomers who worked with little to no tools, which is exactly what’s happening right now with SN 1006 - a supernova that exploded over 1,000 years ago.

Since there are no actual scientific documents to help today's astronomers study the supernova, which shined about as bright as Venus for three months in 1006 AD, researchers from Germany have turned to an unlikely source: Islamic philosopher Ibn-Sīnā, who wrote a number of influential works during the Islamic Golden Age.

One of Ibn-Sīnā’s most notable works is the Kitab al-shifa (The Book of Healing), written around 1013 AD. According to the team led by R. Neuhauser from Jena Observatory, a passage in The Book of Healing could provide insights into how people on the ground viewed SN 1006.

More:
http://www.sciencealert.com/an-ancient-astronomer-from-1000-ad-just-helped-researchers-study-a-supernova

[Ghost Dog]

1. Not at all an unlikely source, except for closed minds. Islamic scholars, back then,

would be the most likely to have recorded and reflected upon such observations (if not Hindu or Chinese...). Especially the likes of Avicenna.

Abu¯cAl¯ı al-H. usain b. cAbdallah b. S ¯ ¯ına (short Ibn S ¯ ¯ına, Lat. Avicenna) was a Persian polymath and lived from AD 980-1037; he wrote books about theology, medicine, and natural sciences including astronomy; Ibn S¯ına follows in most topics Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also tried to improve on the quality and quantity of celestial measurements (see, e.g., Sezgin 1978). He invented the Jacob’s staff or cross staff (Lat.: Baculus Jacobi) for precise altitude measurements (Wiedemann 1927), later replaced by the sextant. In his works on the Almagest and in al-Shifa’¯ , Ibn S¯ına describes some of his own observations, including what he interpreted as Venus transit,2 which was either a sunspot or the Venus transit of AD 1032 May 24 (Goldstein 1969; Kapoor 2013). Ibn S¯ına’s encyclopaedic book entitled ¯ Kitab al-Shif ¯ a’¯ (Book of Healing) is his major work on philosophy, written from about AD 1013 to 1023; a nearly complete manuscript is located in the Bodleian Library, UK; a critical edition of the Arabic text has been published by Madkur et al. (1965), which we have used for our work (see Fig. 1). In that work, Ibn S¯ına discussed Aristotelian philosophy including natural sciences. During the discussion of Aristotle’s Meteorology about transient celestial phenomena in the fifth volume, he mentioned a new star seen in 397h (AD 1006-1007)...

{Note: Even though he was a Persian scholar, we think that it is correct to speak here of an Arabic report about SN 1006, because the transmitted text itself is written in Arabic}

/... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.03798v1

[eppur_se_muova]

2. The heavens have been observed since ancient times, just without telescopes.