A new multidisciplinary study published in the Journal of Indian Philosophy and Science has validated the precision of the 11th-century Sanskrit treatise Siddhanta Sundara. Researchers used modern computational models to test the astronomical tables (sarinis) contained within the manuscript, finding that the ancient algorithms for predicting solar and lunar eclipses align with NASA’s historical eclipse data with a margin of error of less than one percent over several centuries.
The research highlights the sophisticated Vedic mathematical techniques utilized by the author, Jnanaraja, particularly in the calculation of the moon’s latitudinal motion and the earth's shadow. The study suggests that ancient Indian astronomers had developed refined observational methods that accounted for the secular acceleration of the moon, a concept that was not formally described in Western astronomy until much later.