Related papers: Santa and the moon
In India, as in many countries, the main focus in science classrooms is on exams rather than musing on the fascinating concepts and understanding of the world that science offers. This can mean that students lose interest in studying…
The variation of the solar diameter is the subject of hot debates due to the possible effect on Earth climate and also due to different interpretations of long period solar variabilities, including the total solar irradiance. We shortly…
Astronomy, of all the sciences, is possibly the one with the most public appeal across all age groups. This is also evidenced by the existence of a large number of planetaria and amateur astronomy societies, which is unique to the field.…
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has been in orbit around Mars since March 2006. The Context Camera (CTX) on MRO has returned over 100,000 images of the planet at approximately 5-6 meters per pixel, providing nearly global…
Remarkable global correlations exist between geometrical features of terrestrial surface on the Earth, current mean sea level and its geological internal processes whose origins have remained an essential goal in the Earth sciences.…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
Context. Small bodies change their brightness due to different motives: Rotation along their axis or axes, combined with irregular shapes and/or changing surface properties, or changes in the geometry of observations. In this work, we…
One of the main difficulties that students have in learning astronomy topics is that they fail to relate theoretical information with what they experience in the world around them. The construction by students of a conceptual framework in…
Gaia has revealed a clear signal of disequilibrium in the solar neighborhood in the form of a spiral (or snail) feature in the vertical phase-space distribution. We investigate the possibility that this structure emerges from ongoing…
Second part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the real shape of the Earth, the gravitational interactions between our planet and other celestial bodies, and the resulting movement of the…
This book chapter, Saturn's Polar Atmosphere, is to be published by Cambridge University Press as part of a multi-volume work edited by Kevin Baines, Michael Flasar, Norbert Krupp, and Thomas Stallard, entitled "Saturn in the 21st Century."…
We review the broad status of cosmology and discuss a model of fluctuational cosmology in which the universe is created in a phase transition like phenomenon mimicking inflation, and which further consistently explains latest observations…
For centuries some scientists have argued that there is activity on the Moon (or water, as recounted in Parts I & II), while others have thought the Moon is simply a dead, inactive world. The question comes in several forms: is there a…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
Ice-containing clouds strongly impact climate, but they are hard to model due to ice crystal habit (i.e., shape) diversity. We use self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn latent representations of crystals from ice crystal imagery. By…
In Part I we recount the history of observation and laboratory measurement culminating with the excavation of water from a permanently shadowed region near the lunar South Pole by the impact of the LCROSS mission in 2009. In this…
In the parable of Simon's Ant, an ant follows a complex path along a beach on to reach its goal. The story shows how the interaction of simple rules and a complex environment result in complex behavior. But this relationship can be looked…
It is a long-standing question whether human sexual and reproductive cycles are affected predominantly by biology or culture. The literature is mixed with respect to whether biological or cultural factors best explain the reproduction cycle…
A panoramic view, preceded by a short background of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics, is offered on the extent of how Einstein's space-time geometry, believed to be central to an understanding of the structure of the…