Two circular stones 50 centimeters in diameter have been discovered in Castelliere di Lupinpiccolo, an ancient hilltop fortress in the Italian province of Trieste, one of which is one of the oldest celestial maps ever discovered in Italy. There is a possibility that it is.
The discovery was announced in a press release from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF).
Castelliere di Lupinpiccolo is a defensive structure. It has been used as a fortress since 1800-1650 BC. Until 400 BC, Lupine Piccolo’s castle was one of the most important and was first revealed.
Among the many castles in the karst region, Lupinpiccolo Castle is one of the best preserved. The castle stands just outside the town on a limestone hill, topped by walls that are 3 to 4 meters thick, but up to 7 meters thick in some places. The height is kept at a maximum of 3 meters, but originally it would have reached 7 to 8 meters.
Two large circular stones, two thick disks approximately 50 cm in diameter and 30 cm deep, were discovered near the entrance to Castelier and attracted the attention of archaeologists.
One of the stones represents the sun, and the other is engraved with an astronomical map from the 4th century BC, said Paolo Molaro of INAF and researchers from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and ICTP.
german astronomy Journal Astronomische Nachrichten Published a research paper on the stone, the authors of the study said that the celestial map shows the sky above Lupine Piccolo about 2,500 years ago, and that this discovery is among the best known celestial maps published in Italy. He said it would be the oldest.
“Federico Bernardini, who I didn’t know, contacted me and said he needed an astronomer,” Molaro told Media Enough. My first reaction was disbelief, given that the southern part of Scorpio is on the horizon in our latitude. But then I started digging deeper into the question when I discovered that the precession of the equinoxes had caused them to rise by about 10-12 degrees, aligning perfectly with the constellations… So, Orion, the Pleiades star cluster. , and identified the constellation Cassiopeia in its depths. . All points are present except one. ”
The research team has identified 29 stone carvings that perfectly match the constellations of Cassiopeia, Orion, Scorpio, and the Pleiades. Based on the angle of the stone cuts, researchers hypothesize that the sculptures were probably created by the same person using a hammer and a crude metal chisel with a 6- to 7-millimeter tip.
The researchers also used the program Stellarium to simulate the night sky, as a star called Theta Scorpius was so low on the horizon in the 1800s B.C. that it cannot be seen today.
But let’s go to the 29 sign. All but one star overlaps Scorpius, Orion, the Pleiades, and possibly – given the five constellations on the back of the stone – Cassiopeia. And the authors specify that this is an overlap with very high statistical significance: the p-value is much lower than 0.001. In other words, it is highly unlikely that the placement of these symbols is simply the result of chance. That’s not all. The deviation from the actual position is about the size of the sign, indicating that considerable care was taken in its execution.
All but one, we said. However, the 29th sign may also be there on purpose. The authors suggest that the intruder may correspond to a supernova. Or the so-called “failed supernova”. That is, he is one of the celestial bodies that astronomers call transients. They appear at some point and then disappear again. If this is true, researchers suggest that a black hole could exist at that point in the sky today.
The Nebula Disk is a German bronze artifact dating back to approximately 1600 BC, in which gold is used to represent the sun, moon, and Pleiades star cluster, and is thought to be the oldest known representation of the night sky. However, this is more of a symbolic representation than an actual map. For “faithful” maps we have to go back to the 1st century BC, and maps from that period were most likely derived from the catalog of Hyparchus of 135 BC.
Cover photo: INAF