Related papers: The beginning of celestial navigation
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…
In 1785 astronomer William Herschel mapped out the shape of the Milky Way star system using measurements he called "star-gages." Herschel's star-gage method is described in detail, with particular attention given to the assumptions on which…
Observing artificial satellites is a relatively new and unique branch of astronomy that is very interesting and dynamic. One specific aspect of observing these objects is that although they appear amongst the celestial background, as…
Astronomy has been an inherently visual area of science for millenia, yet a majority of its significant discoveries take place in wavelengths beyond human vision. There are many people, including those with low or no vision, who cannot…
The CoRoT and Kepler space missions have detected oscillations in hundreds of Sun-like stars and thousands of field red-giant stars. This has opened the door to a new era of stellar population studies in the Milky Way. We report on the…
With rapid development of techniques for astronomical observations, the precision of measurements has been significantly increasing. Theories of astronomical relativistic reference systems, which are the foundation for processing and…
With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…
In 1980 Kowal and Drake found that in December 1612 and January 1613 Galileo observed the planet Neptune. At that time, according to these authors, Galileo was able to measure angular separations with an accuracy of about 10 seconds of arc.…
Astrometry is a powerful technique in astrophysics to measure three-dimensional positions of stars and other astrophysical objects, including exoplanets and the gravitational influence they have on each other. Interferometric astrometry is…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
Astronomers measure cosmic distances to objects beyond our own galaxy using standard candles: objects of known intrinsic brightness, whose apparent brightnesses in the sky are then taken as an indication of their distances from the…
Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…
Researchers typically resort to numerical methods to understand and predict ocean dynamics, a key task in mastering environmental phenomena. Such methods may not be suitable in scenarios where the topographic map is complex, knowledge about…
Modern astrophysics is undergoing a revolution. As detector technology has advanced, and astronomers have been able to study the sky with finer temporal detail, a rich diversity of sources which vary on timescales from years down to a few…
Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
Astrophysical studies require a knowledge of very accurate positions, motions and distances of stars. A brief overview is given of the significance and development of astrometry by ESA's two astrometric satellites, Hipparcos and Gaia,…
Recent observations of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) at radio frequencies have proved to be a powerful tool for probing the solar environment from the ground. But how far back does this tradition really extend? Our survey of the…
Some European scholars in the second half of 18th century discussed the myth of Atlantis taking into account the studies of the evolution of the Earth and of the beginning and diffusion of civilization, in particular the beginning of…
During the second half of the twentieth century, expensive observatories are being erected at La Silla (Chile), Mauna Kea (Hawai), Las Palmas (Canary Island), and Calar Alto (Spain), to name a view. In 1990, at the beginning of The Decade…
Gravitational time delays, observed in strong lens systems where the variable background source is multiply-imaged by a massive galaxy in the foreground, provide direct measurements of cosmological distance that are very complementary to…