Related papers: The Astronomy of Aboriginal Australia

Cosmological and astrophysical measurements provide powerful constraints on neutrino masses complementary to those from accelerators and reactors. Here we provide a guide to these different probes, for each explaining its physical basis,…

A probabilistic technique for the joint estimation of background and sources with the aim of detecting faint and extended celestial objects is described. Bayesian probability theory is applied to gain insight into the coexistence of…

I discuss an issue arising in analyzing data from astronomical surveys: accounting for measurement uncertainties in the properties of individual sources detected in a survey when making inferences about the entire population of sources.…

The observational basis for asteroseismology is being dramatically strengthened, through more than two years of data from the CoRoT satellite, the flood of data coming from the Kepler mission and, in the slightly longer term, from dedicated…

Photometry of short-period planetary systems allows astronomers to monitor exoplanets, their host stars, and their mutual interactions. In addition to the transits of a planet in front of its star and the eclipses of the planet by its star,…

The study of asteroids, its composition and trajectories, has been a persistent interest in the space exploration community. In addition, they are also perceived as a great threat to life on Earth, considering the possibility of an impact…

Comets, asteroids and moons that orbit stars and planets exterior to our solar system are prefixed with "exo". While the existence of these objects is certain, our understanding of their physical properties, composition, and diversity is…

The optical and infrared spectra of a wide variety of `cool' astronomical objects including the Sun, sunspots, K-, M- and S-type stars, carbon stars, brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets are reviewed. The review provides the necessary…

Our landscape has been shaped by man throughout the millennia. It still contains many clues to how it was used in the past giving us insights into ancient cultures and their everyday life. Our summer school uses archaeology and astronomy as…

Recent observations of small bodies of the Solar System showed evidence of the presence of refractory (asteroidal) material in the Oort cloud. Different models of the origin of the Solar System predict different numbers of rocky objects in…

In the last few years, significant advances have been made in understanding the distributions of exoplanet populations and the architecture of planetary systems. We review the recent progress of planet statistics, with a focus on the inner…

Radio astronomy has changed. For years it studied relatively rare sources, which emit mostly non-thermal radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. radio quasars and radio galaxies. Now it is reaching such faint flux…

This paper examines the theory of a Babylonian origin of Aryabhata's planetary constants. It shows that Aryabhata's basic constant is closer to the Indian counterpart than to the Babylonian one. Sketching connections between Aryabhata's…

Cultures around the world organise stars into constellations, or asterisms, and these groupings are often considered to be arbitrary and culture-specific. Yet there are striking similarities in asterisms across cultures, and groupings such…

Probing the existence of hypothetical particles beyond the Standard model often deals with extreme parameters: large energies, tiny cross-sections, large time scales, etc. Sometimes laboratory experiments can test required regions of…

Armed with an astrolabe and Kepler's laws one can arrive at accurate estimates of the orbits of planets.

All four giant planets in the Solar system possess irregular satellites, characterized by large, highly eccentric and/or inclined orbits that are distinct from the nearly circular, uninclined orbits of the regular satellites. This…

Coronal astronomy is by now a fairly mature discipline, with a quarter century having gone by since the detection of the first stellar X-ray coronal source (Capella), and having benefitted from a series of major orbiting observing…

Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…

Gravitational-wave astronomy will soon become a new tool for observing the Universe. Detecting and interpreting gravitational waves will require deep theoretical insights into astronomical sources. The past three decades have seen…