Related papers: Why are there Seven Sisters?
In the ancient Egypt seven goddesses, represented by seven cows, composed the celestial herd that provides the nourishment to her worshippers. This herd is observed in the sky as a group of stars, the Pleiades, close to Aldebaran, the main…
Cultures around the world organise stars into constellations, or asterisms, and these groupings are often considered to be arbitrary and culture-specific. Yet there are striking similarities in asterisms across cultures, and groupings such…
Most star clusters dissolve into the Galaxy over tens to hundreds of millions of years after they form. While recent Gaia studies have honed our view of cluster dispersal, the exact chronology of which star formation events begat which star…
The problem of origin and age of asteroid families is studied very intensively. First of all youngest families are interesting due to possibility of the reconstruction their collisional history. But in oldest families present objects with…
The distance to Pleiades remains controversial. There is a simple way to resolve the dispute definitely by measuring the distance to one of its brightest members, Atlas, which is astrometric and spectroscopic binary.
Just one generation ago, schoolkids were taught that Aboriginal people couldn't count beyond five, wandered the desert scavenging for food, had no civilization or religion, had no agriculture, couldn't navigate, didn't build houses, and…
We explore 50 Australian Aboriginal accounts of lunar and solar eclipses to determine how Aboriginal groups understood this phenomenon. We summarise the literature on Aboriginal references to eclipses, showing that many Aboriginal groups…
Studies in Australian Indigenous astronomical knowledge reveal few accounts of the visible planets in the sky. However, what information we do have tells us that Aboriginal people were close observers of planets and their motions, noting…
The search of a rational explanation of eclipses pervades the beginnings of philosophical and scientific thought. Within this intellectual frame, the knowledge of the "saros cycle" (a cycle of 18 years, 10 or 11 days and 1/3 of a day that…
The Pleiades is the most prominent open star cluster visible from Earth and an important benchmark for simple stellar populations, unified by common origin, age, and distance. Binary stars are its essential ingredient, yet their…
The oral traditions of Aboriginal cultures across Australia contain references to the presence of multiple Suns in the sky at the same time. Explanations of this have been largely regarded as symbolic or mythological, rather than…
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…
In the middle of the third millennium BC the Sumerians must have noticed that the reciprocal of the number 7,in contrast to the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,and 6,could not be expressed by a finite sexagesimal fraction but it recurred every three…
Whilst camped at Ooldea, South Australia, between 1919 and 1935, the amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates CBE (1859-1951) recorded the daily lives, lore, and oral traditions of the Aboriginal people of the Great Victoria Desert region…
Parts of Australia have been privileged to see dazzling lights in the night sky as the Aurora Australis (known as the southern lights) puts on a show this year. Aurorae are significant in Australian Indigenous astronomical traditions.…
As part of the Accretion Discs in H$\alpha$ with OmegaCAM (ADHOC) survey, we imaged in r, i and H-alpha a region of 12x8 square degrees around the Orion Nebula Cluster. Thanks to the high-quality photometry obtained, we discovered three…
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…
Of the hundreds of distinct Aboriginal cultures of Australia, many have oral traditions rich in descriptions and explanations of comets, meteors, meteorites, airbursts, impact events, and impact craters. These views generally attribute…
Rotationally fissioned asteroids produce unbound daughter asteroids that have very similar heliocentric orbits. Backward integration of their current heliocentric orbits provides an age of closest proximity that can be used to date the…
An impressive bulk of multiple astronomical observations indicates that there are plenty of objects in the universe with the age which cannot be explained by the conventional theory. A model is considered which successfully describes all…