Related papers: The beginning of celestial navigation
The possible discovery of astronomical effects due to precession - such as the shift in the declination of heliacal raising of bright stars or the precession of the equinoxes - is reviewed for various ancient cultures in the world. Although…
To maximize the number of transients discovered on the sky, should sky-monitoring projects stare at one location or continually jump from location to location, tiling the sky? If tiling is preferred, what cadence maximizes the discovery…
BRITE-Constellation is devoted to high-precision optical photometric monitoring of bright stars, distributed all over the Milky Way, in red and/or blue passbands. Photometry from space avoids the turbulent and absorbing terrestrial…
Observation of the CMB is central to observational cosmology, and the Antarctic Plateau is an exceptionally good site for this work. The first attempt at CMB observations from the Plateau was an expedition to the South Pole in December 1986…
The discovery of cosmic rays, a milestone in science, was based on the work by scientists in Europe and the New World and took place during a period characterised by nationalism and lack of communication. Many scientists that took part in…
Scientific discovery is mediated by ideas that, after being formulated in hypotheses, can be tested, validated, and quantified before they eventually lead to accepted concepts. Computer-mediated discovery in astrophysics is no exception,…
All but a few digital computers used for scientific computations have supported floating-point and digital arithmetic of rather limited numerical precision. The underlying assumptions were that the systems being studied were basically…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and…
In this short review, we trace the evolution of inference in astronomy, highlighting key milestones rather than providing an exhaustive survey. We focus on the shift from classical optimization to Bayesian inference, the rise of…
Newtonian gravitation is non-radiative but is extremely pervasive and penetrates equally into every media because it cannot be shielded. The extra terrestrial fgravity is responsible for earth's trajectory. However its correlation or…
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 recent explosive growth of small satellite operations driven primarily from an academic or pedagogical need, has demonstrated the viability of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies in space. They have also leveraged and shown the need…
Consider a stationary agent A at an unknown location and a mobile agent B that must move to the vicinity of and then circumnavigate A at a prescribed distance from A. In doing so, B can only measure its distance from A, and knows its own…
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the accuracy of our knowledge of close stellar passage distances in the pre-GAIA era.We used the most precise astrometric and kinematic data available at the moment and prepared a list of 40 stars…
Galileo Galilei had sufficient skill as an observer and instrument builder to be able to measure the positions and apparent sizes of objects seen through his telescopes to an accuracy of 2" or better. However, Galileo had no knowledge of…
With the new discoveries enabled thanks to the recent space missions, stellar physics is going through a revolution. However, these discoveries opened the door to many new questions that require more observations. The European Space…
From the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century, photographic plates served as the primary detectors for astronomical observations. Astronomical photographic observations in China began in 1901, and over a century, a total of…
Understanding local currents in the North Atlantic region of the ocean is a key part of modelling heat transfer and global climate patterns. Satellites provide a surface signature of the temperature of the ocean with a high horizontal…
We present a review of data types and statistical methods often encountered in astronomy. The aim is to provide an introduction to statistical applications in astronomy for statisticians and computer scientists. We highlight the complex,…