Related papers: Introduction to pinhole astronomy
Taking up a method devised by Taylor and Wheeler and collecting pieces of their work we offer a self-contained derivation of the formulae giving both the precession of the orbit of a planet around the Sun and the deflection angle of a light…
Recent measurements of photon tunneling through individual subwavelength pinholes in a gold film covered with a layer of polydiacetylene (Phys. Rev. Letters 88, 187402 (2002)) provided strong indication of "photon blockade" effect similar…
We describe a new inquiry design aimed at teaching advanced high-school to senior college students the basics of stellar populations. The inquiry is designed to have students come up with their own version of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram…
Tests of gravity performed in the solar system show a good agreement with general relativity. The latter is however challenged by observations at larger, galactic and cosmic, scales which are presently cured by introducing "dark matter" or…
We generalize our previous work on gravitational lensing by a Kerr black hole in the strong deflection limit, removing the restriction to observers on the equatorial plane. Starting from the Schwarzschild solution and adding corrections up…
Radio wavelength observations of solar system bodies are a powerful method of probing many characteristics of those bodies. From surface and subsurface, to atmospheres (including deep atmospheres of the giant planets), to rings, to the…
Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…
The Earth itself is not stationary but keeps revolving, and its motion further satisfies the law of equal area according to the heliocentric doctrine. That satisfaction can be used to construct the mathematical relationships between the…
Astronomical polarimetry is a powerful technique that can provide physical information sometimes difficult or impossible to obtain by any other type of observation. Almost every class of binary star can benefit from polarimetric…
A popular pedagogical approach for introducing diffraction is to assume normal incidence of light on a single slit or a plane transmission grating. Interesting cases of diffraction from a grating at orientations other than normal incidence…
Our understanding of space and time is probed to its depths by black holes. These objects, which appear as a natural consequence of general relativity, provide a powerful analytical tool able to examine macroscopic and microscopic…
Compact objects with a light sphere such as black holes and wormholes can reflect light rays like a mirror. This gravitational lensing phenomenon is called retrolensing and it is an interesting tool to survey dark and compact objects with a…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
The first integrals of the Kepler problem are used to compute preliminary orbits starting from two short observed arcs of a celestial body, which may be obtained either by optical or radar observations. We write polynomial equations for…
In this paper, we study the light double-slit diffraction experiment with quantum theory approach. Firstly, we calculate the light wave function in slits by quantum theory of photon. Secondly, we calculate the diffraction wave function with…
We propose a quantum version of a gedanken experiment which supports the generalized second law of black hole thermodynamics. A quantum measurement of particles in the region outside of the event horizon decreases the entropy of the outside…
Cosmology is becoming an important tool to test particle physics models. We provide an overview of the standard model of cosmology with an emphasis on the observations relevant for testing fundamental physics.
Quantum optics potentially offers an information channel from the Universe beyond the established ones of imaging and spectroscopy. All existing cameras and all spectrometers measure aspects of the first-order spatial and/or temporal…
We provide formulae for the calculation of precise Doppler velocities of sunlight, in both the case of direct observations of the Sun and in reflection from the surfaces of solar system objects such as the Moon or asteroids. We discuss the…