Related papers: Dismantling Hubble's Legacy?
Lot of avenues, the black hole, the wormhole, the dark matter, the dark energy etc. have been opened since the advent of General Theory of Relativity in 1915. Cosmology, the physics of creation and evolution of the universe, which was once…
We present a brief qualitative overview of the current state of the problem of Hubble expansion at the sufficiently small scales (e.g., in planetary systems or local intergalactic volume). The crucial drawbacks of the available theoretical…
I review the current state of determinations of the Hubble constant, which gives the length scale of the Universe by relating the expansion velocity of objects to their distance. There are two broad categories of measurements. The first…
The Hubble diagram is one of the cornerstones of observational cosmology. It is usually analysed assuming that, on average, the underlying relation between magnitude and redshift matches the prediction of a…
Europe and a number of countries in the world are investing significant amounts of public money to operate and maintain large, ground-based astronomical facilities. Even larger projects are under development to observe the faintest and most…
An overview of the experimental and observational status in gravitational physics is given, both for the known tests of general relativity and Newtonian gravity, but also for the increasing number of results where these theories run into…
A critical reading of Lubin & Sandage's 2001 paper on the Tolman effect for the reality of the expansion of the universe clearly reveals that Sandage is far from winning the dispute with Hubble on the issue. After all the years, Hubble's…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
While many observations support the validity of Einstein's general relativity as the theory of gravity, there are yet many that suggest the presence of new physics. In order to explain the high-redshift supernovae Ia observations together…
Although dark matter is a central element of modern cosmology, the history of how it became accepted as part of the dominant paradigm is often ignored or condensed into a brief anecdotical account focused around the work of a few pioneering…
The total number of true, likely and possible planetary nebulae (PN) now known in the Milky Way is nearly 3000, double the number known a decade ago. The new discoveries are a legacy of the recent availability of wide field, narrowband…
Black holes are a common feature of the Universe. They are observed as stellar mass black holes spread throughout galaxies and as supermassive objects in their centres. Observations of stars orbiting close to the centre of our Galaxy…
Considering the hyperbolic nature of the universe, the Hubble's law and the inverse square laws such as, the Coulomb's law and Newton's gravitational law, should be modified in accordance with the special theory of relativity. Consequently…
Astronomy can never be a hard core physics discipline, because the Universe offers no control experiment, i.e. with no independent checks it is bound to be highly ambiguous and degenerate. Thus e.g. while superluminal motion can be…
The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate, together with the total energy density of the Universe, sets the size of the observable Universe, its age, and its radius of curvature. Excellent progress has been made recently toward…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
Times magazine selected Albert Einstein, the German born Jewish Scientist as the person of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, 20th century was the age of science and Einstein's contributions in unraveling mysteries of nature was unparalleled.…
Although black holes are objects of central importance across many fields of physics, there is no agreed upon definition for them, a fact that does not seem to be widely recognized. Physicists in different fields conceive of and reason…
The scientific revolution in the first half of the seventeenth century, pioneered by figures such as Harvey, Galileo, Gassendi, Kepler and Descartes, was disseminated to the northernmost countries in Europe with considerable delay. In this…
This is a personal review of various issues related to massive photometric and astrometric searches. A complete inventory of variable stars down to almost any magnitude limit will improve our understanding of the stellar evolution and the…