Related papers: Learning from Galileo's errors
Historical materials are abundant. Yet, piecing together how human knowledge has evolved and spread both diachronically and synchronically remains a challenge that can so far only be very selectively addressed. The vast volume of materials…
For the vast majority of stars in the second Gaia data release, reliable distances cannot be obtained by inverting the parallax. A correct inference procedure must instead be used to account for the nonlinearity of the transformation and…
We model the formation of the Galactic stellar halo via the accretion of satellite galaxies onto a time-dependent semi-cosmological galactic potential. Our goal is to characterize the substructure left by these accretion events in a close…
De Houtman in 1603, Kepler in 1627 and Halley in 1679 published the earliest modern catalogues of the southern sky. We provide machine-readable versions of these catalogues, make some comparisons between them, and briefly discuss their…
The handed down latitudinal data ascribed to Eratosthenes and Hipparchus are composed and each tested for consistency by means of adjustment theory. For detected inconsistencies new explanations are given concerning the origin of the data.…
In the last few years, the so-called flyby anomaly has been widely discussed, but remains still an illusive topic. This is due to the harsh conditions experienced during an Earth flyby as well as due to the limited data available. In this…
The Galileo spacecraft was orbiting Jupiter between Dec 1995 and Sep 2003. The Galileo dust detector monitored the jovian dust environment between about 2 and 370 R_J (jovian radius R_J = 71492 km). We present data from the Galileo dust…
The propagation of small bodies in the Solar system is driven by the combination of planetary encounters that cause abrupt changes in their orbits and secular long-term perturbations. We propose a propagation strategy that combines both of…
During the voyages that led him to discover the new continent bearing his name, Amerigo Vespucci made interesting astronomical observations of the southern sky. In the past, his data have been interpreted with criteria that do not follow…
Inertial sensors stimulate very large interest, not only for their application but also for fundamental physics tests. Ring laser gyros, which measure angular rotation rate, are certainly among the most sensitive inertial sensors, with…
The Giornata Sesta about the Force of Percussion is a relatively less known Chapter from the Galileo's masterpiece "Discourse about Two New Sciences". It was first published lately (1718), long after the first edition of the Two New…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
During its late orbital mission at Jupiter the Galileo spacecraft made two passages through the giant planet's gossamer ring system. The impact-ionization dust detector on board successfully recorded dust impacts during both ring passages…
The aureoles around stars caused by thin cirrus limit nighttime measurement opportunities for ground-based astronomy but can provide information on high-altitude ice crystals for climate research. In this paper we attempt to demonstrate…
Celeste is a procedure for inferring astronomical catalogs that attains state-of-the-art scientific results. To date, Celeste has been scaled to at most hundreds of megabytes of astronomical images: Bayesian posterior inference is…
Gaia is a satellite mission of the European Space Agency which is creating a catalogue of extremely accurate positions, distances and space motions of two billion stars in our Galaxy, along with more than one hundred thousand solar system…
There is a widespread interest to digitize the precious information contained in the astronomical plate archives, both for the preservation of their content and for its fast distribution to all interested researchers in order to achieve…
This paper presents a system-level engineering approach for the preliminary coverage performance analysis and the design of a generic Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellation. This analysis accounts for both the coverage…
Tests of the Weak Equivalence Principle (WEP) probe the foundations of physics. Ever since Galileo in the early 1600s, WEP tests have attracted some of the best experimentalists of any time. Progress has come in bursts, each stimulated by…
We revise the sunspot observations made by Galileo Galilei and Christoph Scheiner in the context of their controversy on the nature of sunspots. Their sunspot records not included in the current sunspot group database, used as a basis to…