Related papers: Modeling the History of Astronomy: Ptolemy, Copern…
First part of a didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the day and night cycle and the seasons, including the construction of a simplified solar system model and its use as a resource to discuss…
Ptolemy-s planetary model is an ancient geocentric astronomical model, describing the observed motion of the Sun and the planets. Ptolemy accounted for the deviations of planetary orbits from perfect circles by introducing two small and…
Numerical simulations are playing an increasingly important role in modern science. In this work it is suggested to use a numerical study of the famous perihelion motion of the planet Mercury (one of the prime observables supporting…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
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…
This is a written version of a series of lectures aimed at undergraduate students in astrophysics/particle theory/particle experiment. We summarize the important progress made in recent years towards understanding high energy astrophysical…
A didactic sequence of activities on some topics of Astronomy, related mainly with the length and orientation of shadows cast by a gnomon, the movement of shadows during daytime in different seasons of the year, and finding the true…
We'll examine plate tectonics on Earth -- its features and forces -- and examine some concepts that may allow astronomers to ask useful questions regarding numeric models that putatively predict tectonic activity. But exo-planetologists…
This theoretical paper introduces a new way to view and characterize teaching and learning astronomy. It describes a framework, based on results from empirical data, analyzed through standard qualitative research methodology, in which a…
A high-school exercise is used to get an insight into planetary motion.
The field of astronomy is experiencing a data explosion driven by significant advances in observational instrumentation, and classical methods often fall short of addressing the complexity of modern astronomical datasets. Probabilistic…
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…
We present a collection of new, open-source computational tools for numerically modeling recent large-scale observational data sets using modern cosmology theory. Specifically, these tools will allow both students and researchers to…
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.
In this Chapter, I will explore the use of modeling in order to understand how Science works. I will discuss the modeling of scientific communities, providing a general, non-comprehensive overview of existing models, with a focus on the use…
Understanding astrophysical and cosmological processes can be challenging due to their complexity and lack of intuitive analogies. To address this, we present \texttt{AstronomyCalc}, a Python package specifically designed to aid…
We have designed an inquiry-based laboratory activity on transiting extrasolar planets for an introductory college-level astronomy class. The activity was designed with the intent of simultaneously teaching science process skills and…
An overview of the cosmological models with expansion, shear and rotation is presented. Problems of the rotating models are discussed, their general kinematic properties and dynamical realizations are described. A particular attention is…
We consider what is the best way to extract science from large surveys of the Milky Way galaxy. The diversity of data gathered in these surveys, together with our position within the Galaxy, imply that science must be extracted by fitting…
The motion of astronomical bodies and the centre of mass of the system is not always well perceived by students. One of the struggles is the conceptual change of reference frame, which is the same that held back the acceptance of the…