Related papers: Willem Janszoon Blaeu
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…
Cosmic strings were postulated by Kibble in 1976 and, from a theoretical point of view, their existence finds support in modern superstring theories, both in compactification models and in theories with extended additional dimensions. Their…
The first seeds of mathematical intuitionism germinated in Europe over a century ago in the constructive tendencies of Borel, Baire, Lebesque, Poincar\'e, Kronecker and others. The flowering was the work of one man, Luitzen Egbertus Jan…
In this article, Joseph-Louis Lagrange analyzed those numbers which may be represented by the quadratic form $Bt^2 + Ctu + Du^2$. After proving a few theorems on the divisors of such numbers (and their possible forms), Lagrange developed a…
Cornelis Easton (1864-1929) became a journalist and newspaper editor. During most of his career he was active as an amateur astronomer and contributed important papers in international astronomical journals This concerned three areas. The…
Nowadays, astronomers want to observe gaps in exozodiacal disks to confirm the presence of exoplanets, or even make actual images of these companions. Four hundred and fifty years ago, Jean-Dominique Cassini did a similar study on a closer…
2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of astrophysical magnetic fields, when George Ellery Hale recorded the Zeeman splitting of spectral lines in sunspots. With the introduction of Babcock's photoelectric magnetograph it soon…
The art of advertising one's scientific achievements, of which Galileo was an early master, is a trademark of successful modern science. Dedicated believers and mystics of science, such as Kepler, are less popular. Yet, an alleged rigorous…
In the later stages of his life, Christiaan Huygens semi-empirically derived a set of relations between the objective focus and diameter, the eyepiece focus, and the magnification that resulted from combining the two lenses. These relations…
The theory of General Relativity predicts that, since massive bodies curve spacetime, light from a distant source would be deflected by a foreground massive object -- a phenomenon known as \emph{Gravitational Lensing}. Historically, the…
We discuss the reception of Copernican astronomy by the Proven\c{c}al humanists of the XVIth-XVIIth centuries, beginning with Michel de Montaigne who was the first to recognize the potential scientific and philosophical revolution…
Whilst Paul de Casteljau is now famous for his fundamental algorithm of curve and surface approximation, little is known about his other findings. This article offers an insight into his results in geometry, algebra and number theory.…
The first James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image released was of galaxy cluster SMACSJ0723.3- 7327, a lensing cluster at z=0.39 showing detail only JWST can provide. While the majority of the focus has been on the brilliantly lensed…
The era of gravitational-wave astronomy began on 14 September 2015, when the LIGO Scientific Collaboration detected the merger of two $\sim 30 M_\odot$ black holes at a distance of $\sim 400$ Mpc. This event has facilitated qualitatively…
Parallax is the most fundamental technique to measure distances to astronomical objects. Although terrestrial parallax was pioneered over 2000 years ago by Hipparchus (ca. 140 BCE) to measure the distance to the Moon, the baseline of the…
Gerbert of Aurillac was the most prominent personality of the tenth century: astronomer, organ builder and music theoretician, mathematician, philosopher, and finally pope with the name of Silvester II (999-1003). Gerbert introduced firstly…
It would be reasonable to recall some critical issues in physical cosmology development. GR was created by A. Einstein in 1915. In 1917 Einstein proposed the first (static) cosmological model. Soon after the A. Eddington proved that the…
Astronomical interest within the current Colombian territory has its roots in the Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada (1783-1813), which stimulated the creation of an astronomical observatory in 1803, the first one…
We present the astrophysical science case for a space-based, decihertz gravitational-wave (GW) detector. We particularly highlight an ability to infer a source's sky location, both when combined with a network of ground-based detectors to…
In 1847 Christian Ludwig Gerling, Marburg (Germany), suggested the solar parallax to be determined by measuring the position of Venus close to its inferior conjunction, especially at the stationary points, from observatories on nearly the…