Related papers: Micro moon versus macro moon: Brightness and size
It will be shown that the rotation of the Earth in the Earth-Moon system can be detected by comparing the deflection of a Foucault pendulum at noon on the one hand and at midnight on the other hand. More precisely, on 21 June the midnight…
Earthshine is sunlight that has been reflected from the dayside Earth onto the dark side of the Moon and back again to Earth. In recent times, there has been renewed interest in ground-based visible and near-infrared measurements of…
Apparent magnitudes are important for high precision cosmology. It is generally accepted that weak gravitational lensing does not affect the relationship between apparent magnitude and redshift. By considering metric perturbations it is…
The size of a galaxy is one of the fundamental parameters that reflects its growth and assembly history. Traditionally, the size of the Milky Way has been characterized by the scale length of the disk, based on the assumption of an…
Simple models for lensing potentials that successfully reproduce the positions of quadruple images to high accuracy fail abysmally in reproducing the flux ratios of the multiple images, suggesting the presence of small scale structure…
Using data collected by the MACRO experiment from 1989 to the end of its operations in 2000, we have studied in the underground muon flux the shadowing effects due to both the Moon and the Sun. We have observed the Moon shadowing effect…
The sunlight reflected from the Moon during a total lunar eclipse has been transmitted through the Earth's atmosphere on the way to the Moon. The combination of multiple scattering and inhomogeneous atmospheric characteristics during that…
Longitude determination at sea gained increasing commercial importance in the late Middle Ages, spawned by a commensurate increase in long-distance merchant shipping activity. Prior to the successful development of an accurate marine…
There are at least four unexplained anomalies connected with astrometric data. Perhaps the most disturbing is the fact that when a spacecraft on a flyby trajectory approaches the Earth within 2000 km or less, it often experiences a change…
The Moon is generally thought to have formed from the debris ejected by the impact of a planet-sized object with the proto-Earth towards the end of planetary accretion. Modeling of the impact process predicts that the lunar material was…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
The lunar surface has been exposed to the space environment for billions of years and during this time has accumulated records of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. These include solar wind particles and the cosmogenic products of…
Precise measurements of the Earth-Moon distance by the lunar laser ranging (LLR), which begun in the early 1970's, contributed significantly to geodesy, geophysics, and lunar planetology, as well as enabled astrophysicists to perform…
Almost all meteorite impacts occur at oblique incidence angles, but the effect of impact angle on crater size is not well understood, especially for large craters. To improve oblique impact crater scaling, we present a suite of simulations…
Solar activity is controlled by the magnetic field, which also causes the variability of the solar irradiance that in turn is thought to influence the climate on Earth. The magnetic field manifests itself in the form of structures of…
Magnitude is a real-valued invariant of metric spaces, analogous to the Euler characteristic of topological spaces and the cardinality of sets. The definition of magnitude is a special case of a general categorical definition that clarifies…
The hypothesis of lunar origin by a single giant impact can explain some aspects of the Earth-Moon system. However, it is difficult to reconcile giant impact models with the compositional similarity of the Earth and Moon without violating…
The cause for the difference in crustal thickness between the far and near sides of the moon has been considered an open problem in astronomy since 1959 when the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 sent back the first images of the lunar farside. The…
Current thinking about the Moon as a destination has revitalized interest in lunar astronomical observatories. Once seen by a large scientific community as a highly enabling site, the dramatic improvement in capabilities for free-space…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…