Tracking the comings and goings of a planet was a matter of space research more than a thousand year ago before first telescopes were discovered. That time, simple arithmetic was a way to track motion of a planet across the night sky.

A new study on ancient clay tablets revealed that the Babylonia astronomers used geometry to track the planet Jupiter, or what they called ‘the White Star’ at least 1,400 years before Europeans. They were the first to calculate the gas giant’s orbit, it added.

The prehistoric clay tablets discovered in the 19th century in thousands of numbers are very difficult to understand. After their excavation, they were put in museums in the US, Europe and many other regions around the globe. As they were incomprehensible to the untrained eye, nobody tried to understand them.

But Mathieu Ossendrijver, an astrophysicist from Humboldt University, studied these tablets and published his understandings in the journal Science. According to Ossendrijver, an expert in the history of ancient science, he spent a long time in studying four particular Babylonian tablets stored in London’s the British Museum.

“I couldn’t understand what they were about. I couldn't understand anything about them, neither did anyone else. I could only see that they dealt with geometrical stuff”, Ossendrijver said.

More than a year ago, he received some black-and-white pictures of tablets housed in the museum. According to Ossendrijver, one of the tablets was just two inches across and two inches high. It was a kind of Rosetta Stone, he added. He compared the tablet with others and found that it was about planet Jupiter. The researcher analyzed five tablets and calculated the motion of Jupiter relative to other objects in the observable universe.