Friday, September 7, 2007

Sidereal Year

Bhaskara (12th century) accurately calculated the time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun, as 365.2588 days. The modern accepted measurement, calculated with sophisticated instruments is 365.2596 days, a difference of just one minute. Impeccable accuracy, considering he calculated with naked eye.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

btw, egyptians knew the sidereal year to be 365.25 unarguably arnd 300 BC (12 centuries before indians approximated it better :-)) and the earliest sothic cycle when they could have found this 1/4 day discrepancy is placed arnd 3000 to 4000 BC.

not trying to discredit indians, but credit other civilizations too ;-)

nuke said...

Fair enough !!
But calculations of sidereal year were present in texts as old as 500 BC, ,Surya Siddhanta for instance, but the calculations were off by a few minutes.