Found in Trieste karst AND circular stone with 29 engravings which they might represent the oldest sky map in the world: dated to at least 2400 years ago would represent the stars of Scorpio Of Orion of Pleiades and Cassiopeia, as well as a “failed” supernova at a point in the sky where a black hole might be hiding today. This is indicated by a study published in Astronomische Nachrichten (the oldest still active astronomical journal) by astronomer Paolo Molaro of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Trieste and archaeologist Federico Bernardini of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
The two experts started working together about a few years ago, after they entered the Castelliere di Rupinpiccolo was found two large circular stones approximately 50 centimeters in diameter and 30 centimeters thick, dating from between 1800 BC and 400 BC One stone, apart from a circular cut, shows no other traces of working and could represent the disk of the Sun, while the other could be the earliest celestial map, which has ever been discovered.
They are present on its surface 29 engravings, 24 on one side and 5 on the other side: all characters are irregularly spaced but with a common orientation, as if carved by the same person, armed with a hammer and a basic metal chisel with a 6-7 millimeter tip. A compatible bronze tool was found a few kilometers away, in Castelliere di Elleri, and today it is kept in the Archaeological Museum of Muggia.
Thanks to simulations created using software that reconstructs the firmament of past eras, scientists have found one statistically significant overlap between the 28 characters engraved on the stone and the stars of Scorpio, Orion, Pleiades, and (also considering the 5 characters on the back of the stone) Cassiopeia. As for the 29th sign, scholars theorize that it could represent a “failed supernova,” one of those objects that astronomers call transient because they appear and then disappear again. If so, a black hole could exist at that location in the sky today.
The requests that the study will leave OPEN I am many and evocative: it remains to be seen who could have engraved the stone. It is known that the inhabitants who lived in Castelliere at that time did not know the script. If the one carved into the stone were indeed a celestial map, it would prove the existence of a surprising curiosity for astronomy already in protohistoric Europe.
The oldest known depiction of the night sky, Inaf experts say, is probably the Nebra disc, a bronze artifact with gold appliqués representing the Sun, Moon, and Pleiades: it comes from Germany and dates to around 1600 BC, but it’s more of a symbolic representation than a map. We have to wait for “faithful” maps of the sky until the 1st century BC, the era of maps probably derived from the Hipparchus Catalogue, dated to 135 BC