Related papers: Comets in Australian Aboriginal Astronomy

The first part of this paper contains a brief description of the beginnings of modern cosmology, which, the author will argue, was most likely born in the Year 1912. Some of the pieces of evidence presented here have emerged from recent…

The habitability of planets is strongly affected by impacts from comets and asteroids. Indications from the ages of Moon rocks suggest that the inner Solar System experienced an increased rate of impacts roughly 3.8 Gya known as the Late…

To characterize the meteoroid environment around Mercury and its contribution to the planet's exosphere, we combined four distinctive sources of meteoroids in the solar system: main-belt asteroids, Jupiter family comets, Halley-type comets,…

A set of 50,000 artificial Earth impacting asteroids was used to obtain, for the first time, information about the dominance of individual impact effects such as wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking,…

[Abridged] In the late nineteenth century, Mars emerged as one of the most intensively reported astronomical objects in the popular press, driven by favourable oppositions, improved telescopic capabilities and growing speculation regarding…

Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…

The small community of the Tomaraho, an ethnic group culturally derived from the Zamucos, became known in the South American and world anthropological scenario in recent times. This group, far from the banks of the Paraguay river, remained…

We surveyed 23 comets using the Infrared Array Camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope in wide filters centered at 3.6 and 4.5 microns. Emission in the 3.6 micron filter arises from sunlight scattered by dust grains; these images generally…

In this talk we introduce several topics in combinatorial number theory which are related to groups; the topics include combinatorial aspects of covers of groups by cosets, and also restricted sumsets and zero-sum problems on abelian…

The distribution of the sizes of clusters is not continuous, but rather has local maxima. The numbers of atoms of those maxima distribution is called magic numbers. Two methods of determining magic numbers are firstly introduced, followed…

We have analysed the orbits and ablation characteristics in the atmosphere of 59 earth-impacting fireballs, produced by meteoroids one meter in diameter or larger, described here as meter-scale. Using heights at peak luminosity as a proxy…

The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…

Water ice is a fundamental building material of comets and other bodies in the outer solar system. Yet, the properties of cometary water ice are challenging to study, due to its volatility and the typical distances at which comets are…

Understanding the origin of comets requires knowledge of how the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas 4.567 Gyr ago. Here, a review is presented of how the remnants of this formation process, meteorites and to a lesser extent…

We examine astronomical observations that would be achievable over a future timeline corresponding to the documented history of human civilization so far, $\sim 10^4$ years. We examine implications for measurements of the redshift drift,…

Questions regarding how primordial or pristine the comets of the solar system are have been an ongoing controversy. In this review, we describe comets' physical evolution from dust and ice grains in the solar nebula to the contemporary…

We trace the evolution of research on extreme solar and solar-terrestrial events from the 1859 Carrington event to the rapid development of the last twenty years. Our focus is on the largest observed/inferred/theoretical cases of sunspot…

Geographical distributions, ages and sizes of astronomy-related organizations have been investigated from comprehensive and up-to-date samples extracted from the master files for StarGuides/StarWorlds. Results for professional institutions,…

In the period from about 1890 to 1915 an interdisciplinary and unifying research programme known as "cosmical physics" attracted much scientific and public attention. It typically included aspects of the earth sciences (such as magnetic…

From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…