Related papers: Santa and the moon
A brief review is given of some recent positive developments regarding the reception of archaeoastronomy by the archaeological institutions in Italy. Discussions and problems that are currently going on in this field are also mentioned,…
Animation, which is basically a form of pictorial presentation, has become the most prominent feature of technology-based learning environments. It refers to simulated motion pictures showing movement of drawn objects. Recently, educational…
The halo of the Miky Way might contain numerous and dense substructures inside which the putative weakly interacting massive particles (suggested as the main constituent of the astronomical dark matter) would produce a stronger annihilation…
The halo of the Milky Way provides unique elemental abundance and kinematic information on the first objects to form in the Universe, which can be used to tightly constrain models of galaxy formation and evolution. Although the halo was…
This lesson unit has been developed within the framework the EU Space Awareness project. It provides an insight into the history and navigational methods of the Bronze Age Mediterranean peoples. The students explore the link between…
Although the Sun is our closest star by many orders of magnitude and despite having sunspot records stretching back to ancient China, our knowledge of the Sun's magnetic field is far from complete. Indeed, even now, after decades of study,…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
Oscillations are observed in all branches of science and culture, ranging from the behavior of ele-mentary particles, atoms, molecules in simple chemical or physical systems or even in complex organisms, up to oscillations of the behavior…
Astronomy and related fields are at the forefront of science and technology; answering fundamental questions and driving innovation. Although blue-skies research like astronomy rarely contributes directly with tangible outcomes on a short…
We use contemporary mathematical notation to describe the method for determining the age of the ecclesiastical moon as mandated by pope Gregory XIII and elaborated in the book of Christopher Clavius \emph{Romani calendarii explicatio}. The…
On January 20th, 2019, a total lunar eclipse was possible to be observed in Santiago, Chile. Using a smartphone attached to a telescope, photographs of the phenomenon were taken. With Earth's shadow on those images, and using textbook…
A scientifically literate society is important for many different reasons, some of which include democratic and scientific topics. This study was performed in order to identify topics in astronomy and science in general that may not be well…
Lunar occultation can be used to measure the proper motions of some of the long time scale microlensing events, $t_{e} \gsim 70$ days, now being detected toward the Galactic bulge. The long events are difficult to explain within the context…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
Despite its importance to questions of lunar origin, the chemical composition of the Moon is not precisely known. In recent years, however, the isotopic composition of lunar samples has been determined to high precision and found to be…
We tested the effectiveness on learning of hands-on, night-time laboratories that challenged student misconceptions in a non-major introductory astronomy class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We present a new assessment examination…
Existing data sets include an image of the Universe when it was 0.4 million years old (in the form of the cosmic microwave background), as well as images of individual galaxies when the Universe was older than a billion years. But there is…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization provided a checklist to help people distinguish between accurate and misinformation. In controlled experiments in the United States and Germany, we investigated the utility of this…
We describe in detail an advanced project devised for outstanding High School (or undergraduate) students with appropriate abilities in physical reasoning (rather than with a good standard preparation), centered around the well-known…
This study examines the potential of using math-themed postage stamps in mathematics lessons as a tool to engage students and integrate the subject with history, art, and culture. Since the first mathematical stamps appeared in the early…