Related papers: The genesis of Hippachus' celestial globe
The recent paper published in European Journal of Physics [1] aimed to demonstrate the kinematical and dynamical equivalence of heliocentric and geocentric systems. The work is performed in the Neo-Tychonian system, with key assumption that…
Thanks to new technology of observations and fresh inputs from particle physics, cosmology has advanced on both observational and theoretical fronts. It is therefore opportune that we take stock of the cosmological situation today and…
We have recently compiled a database with all doctoral dissertations (PhDs) completed in modern Greece (1837-2014), in the general area of astronomy and astrophysics, as well as in space and ionospheric physics. A preliminary statistical…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
Part 1 : For more than two millennia, ever since Euclid's geometry, the so called Archimedean Axiom has been accepted without sufficiently explicit awareness of that fact. The effect has been a severe restriction of our views of space-time,…
What is the shape of space is a long-standing question in cosmology. In this talk I review recent advances in cosmic topology since it has entered a new era of experimental tests. High redshift surveys of astronomical sources and accurate…
In a pioneering exposition of mathematical astronomy for the public, Sir John Herschel attributed the stability of the ring of Saturn to its being eccentric with respect to the planet and lopsided (asymmetric in mass) by a minute amount.…
Scientific communication is an essential part of modern science: whereas Archimedes worked alone, Newton (correspondence with Hooke, 1676) acknowledged that "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."…
This article is the first part of a study of the so-called 'mathematical part' of Plato's Theaetetus (147d-148b). The subject of this 'mathematical part' is the irrationality, one of the most important topics in early Greek mathematics. As…
There are multiple generalisations of the Pythagorean theorem to spherical and hyperbolic geometry. A natural one, involving areas of disks with radii equal to the sides of a proper triangle, was discovered in the hyperbolic case by Maria…
I critically review a methodology of using clusters of galaxies as cosmological probes. The understanding of the abundances and spatial correlations of dark matter halos has been significantly advanced especially for a last few years.…
For decades, perhaps even centuries, the exchange of publications between observatories was the most important source of information on new astronomical results, either in the form of observational data or new scientific theories. In…
John Couch Adams predicted the location of Neptune in the sky, calculated the expectation of the change in the mean motion of the Moon due to the Earth's pull, and determined the origin and the orbit of the Leonids meteor shower which had…
For a much better-founded theory, check Wing Ip, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L16203, doi:10.1029/2005GL025386, 2006 (see also http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl0616/2005GL025386/)
Since the release of the Hipparcos catalog in 1997, the distance to the Pleiades open cluster has been heavily debated. The distance obtained from Hipparcos and those by alternative methods differ by 10 to 15 %. As accurate stellar…
We analyse the distribution of position angles of 1 million galaxies from the Hyperleda catalogue, a sample that presents the galaxies coordinates in the celestial sphere, information that allows us to look for a possible privileged…
The optical Galactic Plane H$\alpha$ surveys IPHAS and VPHAS+ are dramatically improving our understanding of Galactic stellar populations and stellar evolution by providing large samples of stars in short lived, but important, evolutionary…
I critically discuss in a pedagogical and phenomenological way a few crucial tests challenging the claims by Pietronero and collaborators that there is no evidence from available galaxy catalogues that the Universe is actually homogeneous…
Major advancements in space science and detector technology brought about a revolution in global astrometry, the science of measuring distances and motions of stars in the Milky Way and in the local universe. From the first ESA astrometric…
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…