Related papers: Dismantling Hubble's Legacy?
With the availability of nice images and amazing, dramatic stories, the fundamental questions it addresses, and the attraction is exerces on many, it is often assumed that astronomy is an obvious topic for the media. Looking more carefully,…
An exact determination of the Hubble constant remains one of key problems in cosmology for almost a century. However, its modern values derived by various methods still disagree from each other by almost 10%; the greater values being…
British physicist Stephen Hawkings most important discovery was that black holes are not so black, as they possess a temperature and emit thermal radiation. In his popular science texts, Hawking offered a detailed explanation of this…
Cosmology is operating now on a well established and tightly constraining empirical basis. The relativistic LambdaCDM hot big bang theory is consistent with all the present tests; it has become the benchmark. But the many open issues in…
Who discovered the expanding universe? Was it Hubble, or Lema\^itre, or was it just the end result of a long series of investigations? In this article we summarise the main steps and contributions that led to one of the most exciting…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
Arguably, black hole is perhaps the most popular scientific term among the lay person. Perhaps it is the phrasing of the term 'black hole' which appeals to the popular imagination, offering some exotic visual of a cosmic object to the…
The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) stands for the mean surface brightness of the sky as we would see it from a representative vantage point in the intergalactic space outside of our Milky Way Galaxy. Averaged over the whole 4 pi solid…
The Hubble constant is of paramount importance in astrophysics and cosmology. A large number of methods have been developed with different electromagnetic probes to estimate its value. The most recent results show a tension between values…
The idea of an accelerating universe comes almost simultaneously with the determination of Hubble's constant by one of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Projects. The age of the universe dilemma is probably the link between these two issues.…
There is general agreement that the universe began with an "explosion" of matter and energy at a "singularity", the "Big Bang". This paper analyses the mechanics of that beginning and two alternative theories related to it: - The…
After a brief introduction to the sixteenth and seventeenth century views of the Universe and the nineteenth century paradox of Olbers, we start the history of the cosmic expansion with Hubble's epochal discovery of the recession velocities…
We list a few things that we do not understand about stars and that most people ignore. These are all hard problems. We can learn more cosmology by working on them to reduce the systematic errors they introduce than by trying to derive…
The Hubble constant sets the size and age of the Universe, and, together with independent determinations of the age, provides a consistency check of the standard cosmology. The Hubble constant also provides an important test of our most…
Black holes were predicted by Einstein General Relativity (GR). Because of unusual properties of these objects their existence is almost unbelievable. There are gravitation theories which do not predict the black hole appearance. By now,…
Whilst astronomy as a science is historically founded on observations at optical wavelengths, studying the Universe in other bands has yielded remarkable discoveries, from pulsars in the radio, signatures of the Big Bang at submm…
Cosmos has always sparked human curiosity to unveil and speculate its fascinating secrets. This curiosity has ultimately opened a window to other worlds. After years of observation, computation, and data analysis, scientists have revealed…
The possible discovery of astronomical effects due to precession - such as the shift in the declination of heliacal raising of bright stars or the precession of the equinoxes - is reviewed for various ancient cultures in the world. Although…
The recently unveiled deep-field images from the James Webb Space Telescope have renewed interest in what we can and cannot see of the universe. Answering these questions requires understanding the so-called "cosmological horizons" and the…
We review the relatively new, internet-enabled, and rapidly-evolving field of citizen science, focusing on research projects in stellar, extragalactic and solar system astronomy that have benefited from the participation of members of the…