Related papers: Thinking about Archeoastronomy
Wide-angle surveys have been an engine for new discoveries throughout the modern history of astronomy, and have been among the most highly cited and scientifically productive observing facilities in recent years. This trend is likely to…
A selection of astrometric catalogues are presented in three tables for respectively positions, proper motions and trigonometric parallaxes. The tables contain characteristics of each catalogue showing the evolution in optical astrometry,…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…
Prehistoric sanctuaries of Daunia date back several thousand years. During the Neolithic and Bronze Age the farmers in that region dug hypogea and holes whose characteristics suggest a ritual use. In the present note we summarize the…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
Astronomy is increasingly encountering two fundamental truths: (1) The field is faced with the task of extracting useful information from extremely large, complex, and high dimensional datasets; (2) The techniques of astroinformatics and…
Puzzle solving is a difficult problem in its own right, even when the pieces are all square and build up a natural image. But what if these ideal conditions do not hold? One such application domain is archaeology, where restoring an…
All human societies present unique narratives that shape their customs and beliefs. Despite cultural differences, some symbolic elements (e.g., heroes and tricksters) are common across many cultures. Here, we reconcile these seemingly…
Many have have taken in hand to write a treatise on the Star of Bethlehem, particularly on Kepler's explanation as a stellar birth, triggered by Mars joining a great conjunction (a meeting of Jupiter and Saturn), as he observed it in…
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 astronomical and cosmological studies one often wishes to infer some properties of an infinite-dimensional field indexed within a finite-dimensional metric space given only a finite collection of noisy observational data. Bayesian…
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,…
Astronomical and cosmological knowledge up to the dawn of modern science was profoundly embedded in myth, religion and superstition. Many of these inventions of the human mind remain today stored in different supports: medieval engravings,…
The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of…
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…
Some European scholars in the second half of 18th century discussed the myth of Atlantis taking into account the studies of the evolution of the Earth and of the beginning and diffusion of civilization, in particular the beginning of…
What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative but…
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…
The Art, Astronomy, Technology and Society (AATS) project is an artscience collaboration which dwells in the inbetweenness layer of scientific understanding of the origins of planets and the embodied, intuited ways of knowing. One of the…