Related papers: Lessons from Mayan Astronomy
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
Abridged: The golden age of astrophysics is upon us with both grand discoveries (extra-solar planets, dark matter, dark energy) and precision cosmology. Fundamental understanding of the working of stars and galaxies is within reach, thanks…
The Gaia mission is expected to provide highly accurate astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic measurements for about $10^9$ objects. Automated classification of detected sources is a key part of the data processing. Here a few aspects…
Throughout the processing and analysis of survey data, a ubiquitous issue nowadays is that we are spoilt for choice when we need to select a methodology for some of its steps. The alternative methods usually fail and excel in different data…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
Poor research design and data analysis encourage false-positive findings. Such poor methods persist despite perennial calls for improvement, suggesting that they result from something more than just misunderstanding. The persistence of poor…
We present a summary of the major contributions to the Special Session on Data Management held at the IAU General Assembly in Prague in 2006. While recent years have seen enormous improvements in access to astronomical data, and the Virtual…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two…
The discovery of cosmic radio emission by Karl Jansky in the course of searching for the source of interference to telephone communications and the instrumental advances which followed, have led to a series of new paradigm changing…
How stars are born from clouds of gas is a rich physics problem whose solution will inform our understanding of not just stars but also planets, galaxies, and the universe itself. Star formation is stupendously inefficient. Take the Milky…
Modern astronomical surveys are producing datasets of unprecedented size and richness, increasing the potential for high-impact scientific discovery. This possibility, coupled with the challenge of exploring a large number of sources, has…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
The heartland of the Khmer empire is literally crowded by magnificent monuments built in the course of many centuries. These monuments include the world-famous state-temples, such as Angkor Wat, but also many other temples and huge water…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
In this review, we explore the historical development and future prospects of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning in astronomy. We trace the evolution of connectionism in astronomy through its three waves, from the early use of…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
How should we invest our available resources to best sustain astronomy's track record of discovery, established over the past few decades? Two strong hints come from (1) our history of astronomical discoveries and (2) literature citation…
In cosmology, we would like to explain our observations and predict future observations from theories of the entire universe. Such cosmological theories make ontological assumptions of what entities exist and what their properties and…
In recent years, machine learning (ML) methods have remarkably improved how cosmologists can interpret data. The next decade will bring new opportunities for data-driven cosmological discovery, but will also present new challenges for…