Related papers: Comparing constellations across cultures
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
There are vast educational research works that highlight the serious difficulties that students present in learning astronomical subjects, as well as the prevalence of a traditional education distanced from the observational and…
Technology has, without doubt, expanded our understanding of space. The Voyager 1 space probe is on the brink of leaving our solar system. Massive telescopes have discovered blasts of fast radio bursts from 10 billion light years away. And…
Essentially everything of astronomical interest is either part of a galaxy, or from a galaxy, or otherwise relevant to the origin or evolution of galaxies. Diverse examples are that the isotropic composition of meteorites provides clues to…
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
Large surveys of the local Universe have shown that galaxies with different intrinsic properties, such as colour, luminosity and morphological type display a range of clustering amplitudes. Galaxies are therefore not faithful tracers of the…
Galaxy morphology is a product of how galaxies formed, how they interacted with their environment, how they were influenced by internal perturbations, AGN, and dark matter, and of their varied star formation histories. This article reviews…
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…
Modern society has led many people to become consumers of data unlike previous generations. How this shift in the way information is communicated and received - including in areas of science - and affects perception and comprehension is…
Astronomy has a rich tradition of using color photography and imaging, for visualization in research as well as for sharing scientific discoveries in formal and informal education settings (i.e., for "public outreach.") In the modern era,…
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…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain many independent gravitational effects at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. This review describes the…
Many approaches have dealt with the hypothesis that the environment contain information, mostly focusing on how humans decode information from the environment in visual perception, navigation, and spatial decision-making. A question yet to…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
We discuss the outcomes of surveys addressing the career situation of astronomers in Germany and the UK, finding social and cultural differences between communities as well as gender bias in both.
The music genre perception expressed through human annotations of artists or albums varies significantly across language-bound cultures. These variations cannot be modeled as mere translations since we also need to account for cultural…
Timescales in astronomy comprise the largest range of any scientific discipline. In the construction of physical models, this circumstance may both be a blessing and a curse. For example, galaxy evolution occurs on typical timescales of…