What a wonderful question! The simple answer is that they relied on centuries of previous observations. Remember, even computers have to be programmed with the right data to produce future times of ...
More than a thousand years ago, astronomers from the Maya civilization developed one of the most sophisticated time-keeping systems in the ancient world—a system that could predict solar eclipses for ...
"Cosmic archaeologists" have discovered an iron-deficient second-generation star, which provides evidence of how ancient ...
It's a new window into the first star explosions.
Still in its original galaxy, a rare holdout from the second generation of stars sheds new light on the origins of the ...
Before telescopes, ancient Greek astronomers relied on naked-eye observations of the night sky to understand the universe around them. The meticulous star catalog belonging to one of the best of these ...
A piece of thousand-year-old parchment is finally giving up its secrets. In a major breakthrough this week, researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park used X-ray beams to ...
"The Ancient Astronomers of Timbuktu takes us from the edge of the Sahara Desert, to Addis Ababa in the East and Cape Town on the Southern tip of Africa. We follow investigative and collaborative ...