Related papers: Fire in the sky: The southern lights in Indigenous…
Unfettered access to dark night skies is rapidly diminishing, due to light pollution and satellite mega-constellations tracks. Scientists should wake up and do more to stand up to Big Light and Big Space and preserve this natural resource.
We have created a show about the Solar System, freely available for both planetariums and home viewing, where objects in space are represented with sound as well as with visuals. For example, the audience listens to the stars appear above…
Being footprints of major magnetic storms and hence major solar eruptions, mid- to low-latitude aurorae have been one of the pathways to understand solar-terrestrial environments. However, it has been reported that aurorae are also…
Lightning is an important electrical phenomenon, known to exist in several Solar System planets. It carries information on convection and cloud formation, and may be important for pre-biotic chemistry. Exoplanets and brown dwarfs have been…
Space weather is a relatively new discipline which is generally unknown to the wider public, despite its increasing importance to all of our daily lives. Outreach activities can help in promoting the concept of space weather. In particular…
The existence of a thermodynamic arrow of time in the present universe implies that the initial state of the observable portion of our universe at (or near) the ``big bang'' must have been very ``special''. We argue that it is not plausible…
Clouds and hazes are important throughout our solar system and in the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and extrasolar giant planets. Among the brown dwarfs, clouds control the colors and spectra of the L-dwarfs; the disappearance of clouds helps…
This paper presents a brief review of the current status of ultrahigh energy cosmic ray observations and discusses nearby starburst-like galaxies as their possible origin.
Indications are presented for a significant connection between the relative motion of the planets and the appearance of energetic solar flares. Based on the records of the last four decades, the analysis highlights remarkable features and a…
Recent observations of hydrogen absorption that occurred when the first stars turned on may give insights into the nature of dark matter.
Flares are powerful energy releases occurring in stellar atmospheres. Solar flares, the most intense energy bursts in the solar system, are however hardly noticeable in the total solar luminosity. Consequently, the total amount of energy…
In his 1981 article, Roberts highlights the term 'stellify' defined as "to transform (a person or thing) into a star or constellation, to place among the stars." Using the case of the Tabwa people of central Africa, not the Democratic…
In this article I briefly discuss the characteristics of the Auger observatories paying particular attention to the role of inclined showers, both in the search for high energy neutrino interactions deep in the atmosphere and as an…
Over the last 30 years or so, a handful of events observed in ground-based cosmic ray detectors seem to have opened a new window in the field of high-energy astrophysics. These events have energies exceeding 5x10**19 eV (the region of the…
We show that the arrow of time is intimately related to the geometry and topology of the whole universe, and is therefore best understood as a cosmological phenomenon.
The sacred landscape of the Inka capital Cusco was conceived in accordance with a complex cosmographic view in which religion and astronomy were intimately connected. Some previously unnoticed possibilities in interpreting these connections…
Observations of a long-lasting Gamma-ray burst, one that has the brightest optical counterpart yet discovered, challenge theoretical understanding of these bursts but may enhance their usefulness as cosmic probes.
The term "ultraviolet (UV) burst" is introduced to describe small, intense, transient brightenings in ultraviolet images of solar active regions. We inventorize their properties and provide a definition based on image sequences in…
The orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light is potentially interesting for astronomical study of rotating objects such as black holes, but the effect of reduced spatial coherence of astronomical light sources such as stars is largely…
Extreme Scattering Events are sometimes manifest in the light-curves of compact radio-quasars at frequencies of a few GHz. These events are not understood. The model which appears to offer the best explanation requires a new population of…