Related papers: Lessons from Mayan Astronomy
As our capacity to study ever-expanding domains of our science has increased (including the time domain, non-electromagnetic phenomena, magnetized plasmas, and numerous sky surveys in multiple wavebands with broad spatial coverage and…
Recent and forthcoming advances in instrumentation, and giant new surveys, are creating astronomical data sets that are not amenable to the methods of analysis familiar to astronomers. Traditional methods are often inadequate not merely…
From the moment astronomical observations are made the resulting data products begin to grow stale. Even if perfect binary copies are preserved through repeated timely migration to more robust storage media, data standards evolve and new…
Astronomy is increasingly encountering two fundamental truths: (1) The field is faced with the task of extracting useful information from extremely large, complex, and high dimensional datasets; (2) The techniques of astroinformatics and…
From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…
It is well known that the best way to understand astronomical data is through machine learning, where a "black box" is set up, inside which a kind of artificial intelligence learns how to interpret the features in the data. We suggest that…
We show that many ancient Indian mythological legends are really allegorical depictions of astronomical and other physical phenomena of which the composers had a good idea. This detail enables us to also use techniques of astronomical…
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming astronomical research, yet the scientific community has largely treated this transformation as an engineering challenge rather than an epistemological one. This perspective article argues that…
Traditional Aboriginal Australian cultures include a significant astronomical component, perpetuated through oral tradition and ceremony. This knowledge has practical navigational and calendrical functions, and sometimes extends to a deep…
Astronomy has played a major part in the development of civilisations, not only through conceptual developments, but most importantly through the very practical gains obtained through the observation of Sun, Moon planets and stars. Space…
For more than 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians have incorporated celestial events into their oral traditions and used the motions of celestial bodies for navigation, time-keeping, food economics, and social structure. In this paper, we…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…
Astronomy, as many other scientific disciplines, is facing a true data deluge which is bound to change both the praxis and the methodology of every day research work. The emerging field of astroinformatics, while on the one end appears…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
Astronomy is changing. Large projects, large collaborations, and large budgets are becoming the norm. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one example of this new astronomy, and in operating the original survey, we put in place and…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…