World's oldest star chart may be 2,300 years old and from China — but not everyone agrees

The Dunhuang map, an ancient map with drawings of stars.

The oldest star chart in the world was made in China more than 2,300 years ago, a hotly debated preprint study finds.

Researchers at the Chinese National Astronomical Observatories analyzed the "Star Manual of Master Shi," the oldest surviving star catalog in China, using a novel digital image processing technique. The method, called Generalized Hough Transform, uses a type of artificial intelligence known as computer vision to find and mitigate significant errors between similar images.