Related papers: "Astronomy" or "astrology": a brief history of an …
Astronomy is an observationally-led subject where chance discoveries play an important role. A whole range of such discoveries is continually made, from the trivial to the highly significant. What is generally needed is for luck to strike…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
Astronomy has played a major part in the development of civilisations, not only through conceptual developments, but most importantly through the very practical gains obtained through the observation of Sun, Moon planets and stars. Space…
There exists many different versions of astrology that are different from each other and sometimes even in conflict with each other. But the basis of every astrological system is the assumption of a connection between the motion of…
For generations, people have complained that things used to be better in the past. In this paper, we investigate this change by specifically looking at creativity in astronomy. To do this,we explore if older constellations reflected a…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
The term complexity derives etymologically from the Latin plexus, which means interwoven. Intuitively, this implies that something complex is composed by elements that are difficult to separate. This difficulty arises from the relevant…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
The last two decades have seen the number of known exoplanets increase from a small handful to nearly 2000 known exoplanets, thousands more planet candidates, and several upcoming missions that are expected to further increase the…
In this short review, we trace the evolution of inference in astronomy, highlighting key milestones rather than providing an exhaustive survey. We focus on the shift from classical optimization to Bayesian inference, the rise of…
In the last two decades, Bayesian inference has become commonplace in astronomy. At the same time, the choice of algorithms, terminology, notation, and interpretation of Bayesian inference varies from one sub-field of astronomy to the next,…
This is a presentation of the purpose of astronomy in the context of modern society. After exposing two misconceptions about astronomy, I detail its role in five domains, certified knowledge, incorporated abilities, innovations, collective…
An emerging theme in modern astrophysics is the connection between astronomical observations and the underlying physical phenomena that drive our cosmos. Both the mechanisms responsible for the observed astrophysical phenomena and the tools…
Being one of the most fascinating and ancient sciences, astronomy has always played a special role in society. In 2022 ESO organised an online conference to offer the community a platform to discuss astronomical topics of sociological and…
Astronomy is a precise and relatively simple science because objects accelerate in a gravitational field at the same rate, irrespective of their composition. Galileo knew this, and Einstein took it as the basis for general relativity.…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…