Related papers: Reconstructing the Star Knowledge of Aboriginal Ta…
Cultural Astronomy sits at the intersection of our study of the universe and the human experience, exploring how we observe the stars, interpret their motions, and incorporate them into our perspectives of the nature of reality. "Astronomy…
Around the turn of the last century, star clusters of all kinds were considered "simple" stellar populations. Over the past decade, this situation has changed dramatically. At the same time, star clusters are among the brightest stellar…
We list a few things that we do not understand about stars and that most people ignore. These are all hard problems. We can learn more cosmology by working on them to reduce the systematic errors they introduce than by trying to derive…
There has been a long standing debate about the existence of maya constellations, but there are several sources of evidences that favour this hypothesis: mural paintings, stelae and codex. In this work, we have recovered and compiled…
Astronomy and related fields are at the forefront of science and technology; answering fundamental questions and driving innovation. Although blue-skies research like astronomy rarely contributes directly with tangible outcomes on a short…
Despite their paucity, massive hot stars are real cosmic engines of fundamental importance in shaping our Universe, from its very early stages up to its current appearance. Understanding the physics of massive stars is then a key issue for…
Astronomy, often perceived as a distant or luxury science, holds immense potential as a driver for sustainable local socio-economic development. This paper explores how astronomy can create tangible benefits for communities through…
One of the main difficulties that students have in learning astronomy topics is that they fail to relate theoretical information with what they experience in the world around them. The construction by students of a conceptual framework in…
I discuss various aspects of archeoastronomy concentrating on physical artifacts (i.e., not including ethno-archeoastronomy) focusing on the period that ended about 2000 years ago. I present examples of artifacts interpreted as showing the…
The discovery of the first interstellar object passing through the Solar System, 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua), provoked intense and continuing interest from the scientific community and the general public. The faintness of 'Oumuamua, together…
In this review I will describe a number of recent advances in extragalactic astronomy. First of all I will describe our current best estimates of the star formation history of the Universe. Then I will describe measurements of local…
During this last decade our knowledge of the evolutionary properties of stars has significantly improved. This result has been achieved thanks to our improved understanding of the physical behavior of stellar matter in the thermal regimes…
The detection of exoplanets and accretion disks around newborn stars has spawned new ideas and models of how our Solar System formed and evolved. Meteorites as probes of geologic deep time can provide ground truth to these models. In…
Stars, and collections of stars, encode rich signatures of stellar physics and galaxy evolution. With properties influenced by both their environment and intrinsic nature, stars retain information about astrophysical phenomena that are not…
The interdisciplinary topic of archaeo-astronomy links science subjects such as astronomy with archaeology and sociology to explore how ancient societies perceived the heavens above. This is achieved by analysing ancient sites such as…
Galactic archaeology is the study of the history of star formation and chemical evolution in the Milky Way, based on present-day stellar populations. Studies of young stars are a key anchor point for Galactic archaeology, since quantities…
The bird-man cult remains the main secret of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), a remote plot of land in the Pacific. This paper includes not only necessary ethnological data, but also some results on the archaeoastronomy. The research of some lines…
Gamma-Ray Bursts represent unique tools to study the early phases of cosmic evolution, the formation of the first stars and galaxies. Absorption line spectra of these sources located in the Epoch of Reionization might provide us with key…
Planetary systems that orbit white dwarf stars can be studied via spectroscopic observations of the stars themselves. Numerous white dwarfs are seen to have accreted mostly rocky minor planets, the remnants of which are present in the…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…