An ancient Maya astronomer-mathematician has been identified for the first time along with his complex calculations made around 1200 years ago, predicting the orbital cycles of Mars and Venus.

“This is the first direct mention of an ancestral Maya astronomer-mathematician by personal name,” says at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is also the oldest recorded name of an astronomer-mathematician ever known from anywhere in the Americas, he says.

The Maya civilisation flourished in Central America between roughly 2000 BC and AD 1697. They had advanced knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, but much of it was lost after the mass burning of their books by Spanish missionaries.

Since 2010, excavations at the site of Xultun, Guatemala, have revealed astronomical and mathematical inscriptions inside a small masonry building.

Subscriber-only newsletter

Sign up to Our Human Story

Sign up to newsletter

On the east and north-east walls of the building are around 50 texts that scientists believe are “rough drafts” made by Maya mathematicians as they charted and predicted the cycles of celestial objects relative to Earth and to one another.

Rossi and his colleagues have painstakingly deciphered one of these murals, named Text 19. At the bottom of the mural is the name of Sak Tahn Waax, which translates to White-chested Fox, who is believed to be the author of the formula.

Text 19 consists of 11 hieroglyphs, which had to be scanned, photographed and magnified under different illumination angles, and compared with other, later, astronomical-mathematical writings, before their meaning could be deduced.

While similar mathematical and astronomical expertise is found across Maya cities, the mention of Sak Tahn Waax, who the researchers believe was probably male, is unique.

“Whether this is an instance of the scribe himself signing his own calculation or attributing the intellectual work to another, we have a formula and the name of its creator, which serves to demonstrate the importance of this kind of intellectual contribution for Classic Maya people,” says Rossi.

The calendar system on display in Text 19 uses maths in relation to time periods, he says. These time periods were drawn from a 260-day calendar, a 365-day solar calendar, a 584-day approximation of Venus’s synodic cycle (when the planet returns to the same position relative to both Earth and the sun) and a 780-day approximation of Mars’s synodic cycle. The total length of the formula is five Venus synodic cycles or 2920 days, and the date that Text 19 most likely refers to is 7 November of AD 781 in the Julian calendar.

Exactly how this formula would have been applied is unknown, says Rossi, as it “isn’t incorporated into any larger body of work”.

“We think it is meant to concisely and meaningfully show the relationship between these two planets and human counts of time in ways that could then be applied to political ceremony, predictive astronomy and understandings of seasonality,” he says.

Such meticulous mathematical legwork would have been critical to structuring life in a world before computers, smartphones and weather apps, says Rossi.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is finally beginning its mammoth survey of the universe. After a year of testing and calibration, it is starting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is poised to become the most detailed record of the universe ever captured.

“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” said Brian Stone at the US National Science Foundation in a .

For the next decade, Rubin will collect about 10 terabytes of data every night in the form of hundreds of high-resolution images of the southern sky. Each image will cover an area about 40 times the size of the full moon, and the completed survey will include nearly the entirety of the sky that is visible from the southern hemisphere.

This treasure trove of data will serve several purposes. The first, which has already begun, is to alert researchers to anything changing in the night sky, such as the appearance of supernovae or the motion of asteroids and comets.

“Millions of alerts in just the last couple of months show that Rubin is up and running as a discovery machine,” said at Stanford University in California, who is part of the Rubin team. “Now we’re putting it all together.”

These alerts have already led to the discovery of more than 11,000 new asteroids, and they are expected to result in the most complete inventory of solar system objects ever created.

Free newsletter

Sign up to Launchpad

Sign up to newsletter

In addition to canvassing the solar system, Rubin will provide information about more distant objects, building a detailed map of the Milky Way galaxy and peering deeper into the universe.

An early-release image (above) shows a sea of stars, interstellar gas and even distant galaxies. Such deep, detailed images taken again and again over 10 years will enable researchers to study rare cosmic events and even gain insight into dark matter, dark energy and the expansion of the universe.