Related papers: Bernard Yarnton Mills 1920-2011
Radio astronomy has changed. For years it studied relatively rare sources, which emit mostly non-thermal radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. radio quasars and radio galaxies. Now it is reaching such faint flux…
Aperture Arrays have played a major role in radio astronomy since the field emerged from the results of long-distance communication tests performed by Karl Jansky in the early 1930's. The roots of this technology extend back beyond Marconi,…
The Sun has been observed through a telescope for four centuries. However, its study made a prodigious leap at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of photography and spectroscopy, then at the beginning of the following…
The 1974 discovery, by Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor, of the first binary pulsar PSR B1913+16, opened up new possibilities for the study of relativistic gravity. PSR B1913+16, as well as several other binary pulsars, provided {\it…
The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope, operating at 843 MHz with a 5 square degree field of view, is carrying out a radio imaging survey of the sky south of declination -30 deg. This survey (the Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey,…
The article is dedicated to recalling the life and mathematics of Louis Nirenberg, a distinguished Canadian mathematician who recently died in New York, where he lived. An emblematic figure of Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in…
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 has just been awarded to three astronomers: Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess, for their amazing discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Without diminishing the achievement of…
The observational manifestation of a neutron star is strongly connected with the properties of its magnetic field. During the star's lifetime, the field strength and its changes dominate the thermo-rotational evolution and the source…
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) is the largest single dish telescope in the world focused on sub-millimeter astronomy - and it remains at the forefront of sub-millimeter discovery space. JCMT continues itspush for higher efficiency…
On 1 September 1859, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed an anomalous behavior on the Sun. Approximately 17 hours later, magnetic effects of global scales were observed at Earth: aurora borealis and australis in low-latitude…
Observational cosmology of the first decades of the Twentieth Century was dominated by two giants: Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley. Hubble's major contributions were to the study and classification of individual galaxies with large…
During the 1920s and 1930s, Italian physicists established strong relationships with scientists from other European countries and the United States. The career of Bruno Rossi, a leading personality in the study of cosmic rays and an Italian…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
A great astronomer, George Herbig, passed away in Honolulu on October 12, 2013, at the age of 93. His life and career were long and productive, and consistently dedicated to the careful, thorough research that earned him his reputation.…
Continuous, high-precision photometry from space revolutionized many fields of stellar astrophysics, and that extends to the well-studied families of RR Lyrae and Cepheid variable stars as well. After the pioneering work of MOST, the CoRoT…
Understanding the formation and evolution of the stellar-mass binary black holes discovered by LIGO and Virgo is a challenge that spans many areas of astrophysics, from stellar evolution, dynamics and accretion disks, to possible exotic…
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…
It has now been just over four decades since the first discovery of a millisecond spin period pulsar (MSP), B1937+21, by Don Backer and collaborators in late 1982. This finding of an entirely new class of astronomical object revolutionized…
Three decades ago, humanity entered the Exoplanet Era, with the discovery of the first planets orbiting other stars. Today, more than 6000 exoplanets are known - a tally recently bolstered by NASA's TESS spacecraft. Whilst TESS is an…