These Chinese tiny stick drawings contain precious information — very few could understand it in the second century BCE when they were inscribed in silk and placed in the famous Mawangdui tomb, but modern astronomers have studied such markings to learn about the history of celestial objects of the distant past.
These are renderings of different types of comets. In Ancient China, comets were thought to prognosticate events– usually bad ones — and rulers consulted with learned scholars who followed these “sparkling stars” (comets without tails) or “broom stars” (comets with tails).
The Chinese records of comets are the oldest and most thorough: detailed enough for modern scientists to be able to match them up with reappearing comets (like Haley’s Comet) and to conclude that the frequency of plasma-tailed comets has nothing to do with solar activity. (Comet tails are either made of gas/dust or of plasma from solar wind).
Despite such advancements, Ancient Chinese astronomers didn’t think of the earth as a sphere. Rather, they thought of space as infinite, “with the celestial bodies floating in it, driven by a celestial wind”.
Source(s): _Cosmology: historical, literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific perspectives_, 1993, p 25, New York, Garland Pub, “Chinese Cosmology,” Joseph Needham. “Clasification of comets recorded in Ancient China (300 BC-1800AD) and statistics of type-1 tails,” Lin-Shan Tan, Zhong-Wei Hu; He-Jun Quan. In ESA, Proceedings of the Internatiinal Symposium on the Diversity and Similarity of Comets, pp649-651; Sept 1987. Also wikipedia.
