Related papers: Perceptual grouping explains constellations across…
We answer the question whether, when forming constellations in the night sky, people in astronomical cultures around the world and through time consistently imagined and assigned the same symbolism to the same (type of) star group. Evidence…
In traditional astronomies across the world, groups of stars in the night sky were linked into constellations -- symbolic representations rich in meaning and with practical roles. In some sky cultures, constellations are represented as line…
Cultural astronomy reveals ways in which perception and culture have shaped the interpretation of the night sky.
Constellations are partial algebras that are one-sided generalisations of categories. It has previously been shown that the category of inductive constellations is isomorphic to the category of left restriction semigroups. Here we consider…
Probabilistic cross-identification has been successfully applied to a number of problems in astronomy from matching simple point sources to associating stars with unknown proper motions and even radio observations with realistic morphology.…
Star clusters are ideal tracers of star formation activity in systems outside the volume that can be studied using individual, resolved stars. These unresolved clusters span orders of magnitude in brightness and mass, and their formation is…
This review concentrates almost entirely on globular star clusters. It emphasises the increasing realisation that few of the traditional problems of star cluster astronomy can be studied in isolation: the influence of the Galaxy affects…
Galactic globular clusters are not simple stellar populations. And nothing is simple in their study, basically because we try to reconstruct chains of events that occurred at redshift z > 2-3 by observing these objects at z=0, after a…
There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in…
(Abridged) Poorly-populated star clusters may have photometric and structural properties not much different from asterisms, to the point that, in some cases, widely-used databases present conflicting classifications. We investigate the…
A planetary system consists of a host star and one or more planets, arranged into a particular configuration. Here, we consider what information belongs to the configuration, or ordering, of 4286 Kepler planets in their 3277 planetary…
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…
The most distant Kuiper belt objects appear to be clustered in longitude of perihelion and in orbital pole position. To date, the only two suggestions for the cause of these apparent clusterings have been either the effects of observational…
Globular clusters were thought to be simple stellar populations, but recent photometric and spectroscopic evidence suggests that the clusters' early formation history was more complicated. In particular, clusters show star-to-star abundance…
Recently, we have shown that if the ISM is governed by super-sonic turbulent flows, the excursion-set formalism can be used to calculate the statistics of self-gravitating objects over a wide range of scales. On the largest self-gravitating…
Star clusters are fundamental units of stellar feedback and unique tracers of their host galactic properties. In this review, we will first focus on their constituents, i.e.\ detailed insight into their stellar populations and their…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Accumulation of new data on stellar hierarchical systems and the progress in numerical simulations of their formation open the door to genetic classification of these systems, where properties of a certain group (family) of objects are…
Their ubiquity and extreme densities make star clusters probes of prime importance of galaxy evolution. Old globular clusters keep imprints of the physical conditions of their assembly in the early Universe, and younger stellar objects,…