Related papers: Comets in Australian Aboriginal Astronomy
Around the turn of the first Millennium AD, both in Christian polities such as the Byzantine Empire as well as in Buddhist communities such as in Heian Japan, expectations of an end of times emerged. Although based on different religious…
The first large interstellar object discovered near Earth, `Oumuamua, showed half a dozen anomalies relative to comets or asteroids in the Solar system. All natural-origin interpretations of the Oumuamua anomalies contemplated objects of a…
Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive…
We review the history of spacecraft encounters with comets, concentrating on those that took place in the recent past, since the publication of the Comets II book. This includes the flyby missions Stardust and Deep Impact, and their…
Intersection with the debris of a large (50-100 km) short-period comet during the Upper Palaeolithic provides a satisfactory explanation for the catastrophe of celestial origin which has been postulated to have occurred around 12900 BP, and…
Speculation about Martian canals was a recurring feature of late nineteenth-century popular astronomy. This paper examines how colonial newspapers used humour to negotiate the epistemic uncertainty and interpretive excess associated with…
Remote investigations of the ancient solar system matter has been traditionally carried out through the observations of long-period (LP) comets that are less affected by solar irradiation than the short-period counterparts orbiting much…
A mysterious increase of radiocarbon 14C ca. 775 AD in the Earth's atmosphere has been recently found by Miyake et al. (Nature, 486, 240, 2012). A possible source of this event has been discussed widely, the most likely being an extreme…
A review on recent astronomical observations indicating to unexpectedly abundant population of the contemporary and $ z \sim 10 $ universe by massive black holes in all mass ranges are is presented. It is argued that these black holes are…
Half the known extrasolar planets have orbital eccentricities in excess of 0.3. Such large eccentricities are surprising as it is thought that planets form in a protoplanetary disk on nearly circular orbits much like the current states of…
The Gond community is considered to be one of the most ancient tribes of India with a continuing history of several thousand years. They are also known for their largely isolated history which they have retained through the millennia.…
Until recently, the physically relevant singularities occurring in FRW cosmologies had traditionally been thought to be limited to the "big bang", and possibly a "big crunch". However, over the last few years, the zoo of cosmological…
Light pollution is actively destroying our ability to see the stars. Many Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems around the world are based on the stars, and the peoples' ability to observe and interpret stellar positions and…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
Comets are considered as the most primitive objects in the Solar System. Their composition provides information on the composition of the primitive solar nebula, 4.6 Gyr ago. The radio domain is a privileged tool to study the composition of…
Unfortunately, Liu et al. contains a number of errors and omissions which compromise its conclusions. These have to do with the amount of 14C which is necessary to deposit in the atmosphere in order to see a perturbation like that in 774…
We study a cosmological model of gravity coupled to three, self-interacting scalar fields, one of them with negative kinetic term. The theory has cosmological solutions described by three-dimensional quadratic autonomous equations, leading…
The apparent source region (or regions) of long-period comets as well as the definition of the dynamically new comet are still open questions.The aim of this investigation is to look for the apparent source of selected long period comets…
As of 2025, over 6000 planets are known to orbit stars other than our Sun. We can measure their sizes and orbital periods, infer their masses and temperatures, and constrain their compositions. Based on these data, about 1% of extrasolar…
The Oort cloud, a collection of icy bodies orbiting the sun at roughly $10^{3}$ AU to $10^{5}$ AU, is believed to be the source of the long-period comets observed in the inner solar system. Although its existence was predicted nearly 70…