Related papers: Dismantling Hubble's Legacy?
While there has been significant progress in our understanding of the origin and evolu-tion of planetary nebulae in the last 50 years, there remain several unsolved problems. These include the true 3D morphological structure of the nebulae,…
This work is devoted to investigate some consequences of black holes physics beyond the domain of general relativity, mainly in effective extra dimensional models. The investigation is carried along three gravitational effects, namely the…
The unexpected high bump in the UV part of the spectrum found in nearby giant elliptical galaxies, a.k.a. the UV upturn, has been a subject of debate. A remarkable progress has been made lately from the observational side, mainly involving…
How did galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most challenging questions in astronomy today. Answering it requires a careful combination of observational and theoretical work to reliably determine the observed properties of cosmic…
Nearly a century after the true nature of galaxies as distant "island universes" was established, their origin and evolution remain great unsolved problems of modern astrophysics. One of the most promising ways to investigate galaxy…
This paper presents results of a survey of authors of journal articles published over several decades in astronomy. The study focuses on determining the characteristics and accessibility of data behind papers, referring to the spectrum of…
The present rate of the expansion of our Universe, the Hubble constant, can be predicted from the cosmological model using measurements of the early Universe, or more directly measured from the late Universe. But as these measurements…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard theory of gravity, especially where the needs of astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics are concerned. As such, this theory is used for many practical purposes…
Consider the day when an invariant mass peak, roughly compatible with "the Higgs", begins to emerge, say at the LHC, ... and may you see that day. There will be a difference between discovery and scrutiny. The latter would involve an effort…
Present day estimates of the Hubble constant based on Cepheids and on the cosmic microwave background radiation are uncertain by roughly 10% (on the conservative assumption that the universe may not be PERFECTLY flat). Gravitational lens…
Until 1974, the study of black holes was under the hegemony of Einstein's general relativity. However, that same year, Stephen Hawking incorporated quantum theory and discovered that black holes have temperature, entropy, and evaporate.…
NASA's Great Observatories have opened up the electromagnetic spectrum from space, providing sustained access to wavelengths not accessible from the ground. Together, Hubble, Compton, Chandra, and Spitzer have provided the scientific…
Various results are obtained for a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology. We derive an exact equation that determines Hubble's law, clarify issues concerning the speeds of faraway objects and uncover a "tail-light angle effect" for distant…
A generalisation to electrodynamics and Yang-Mills theory is presented that permits computation of the speed of light. The model presented herewithin indicates that the speed of light in vacuo is not a universal constant. This may be…
Planetary nebulae have been used as tracers of light and kinematics for the stellar populations in early-type galaxies since more than twenty years. Several empirical properties have surfaced: for example the invariant bright cut-off of the…
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…
The standard $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter cosmological model provides an amazing description of a wide range of astrophysical and astronomical data. However, there are a few big open questions, that make the standard model look like a…
Over the last 20 years, supernovae have become a key tool to constrain the expansion history of the Universe through the construction of Hubble diagrams, using luminosity distances to supernovae belonging to the "Ia" subtype. This technique…
Soon after he proposed three classic observational tests for the general theory of relativity, Einstein realised that a consistent description of the universe as a whole provided another important challenge for the theory. In this essay, we…