Records of solar eclipses from a millennium and a half ago have allowed scientists to refine measurements of Earth's changing rotation.
The discrepancy between the accepted length of a day which we all set our watches to and a standardized metric precisely counted out by atomic clocks – the most accurate timekeeping devices we have – is a measurement known as ΔT .
But, it also works in reverse! If you have the precise time and location of a solar eclipse, you can work out ΔT. Scientists have been able to work out ΔT from historical records from China, Europe and the Middle East. This is to fill in a significant gap: from the fourth to the seventh centuries CE, there is a scarcity of solar eclipse records. It's fiddly work. Often details that are pertinent to modern studies have not been included in the records, for instance. But the researchers were able to pinpoint five solar eclipses from records that hadn't previously been analyzed.
Largely, the values for ΔT that the team was able to derive from these results were consistent with previous estimates.
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