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Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
What is habitability? Can we quantify it? What do we mean under the term habitable or potentially habitable planet? With estimates of the number of planets in our Galaxy alone running into billions, possibly a number greater than the number…
The outbreak of epidemics, the emergence of the financial crisis, the collapse of ecosystem, and the explosive spreading of rumors, we face many challenges in today's world. These real-world problems can be abstracted into a sequential…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
Orbital debris is a nonlinear control problem in a stratified orbital environment, not a static inventory. This paper develops a reduced-order shell-and-size framework that connects collision-rate scaling, fragment-production gain, natural…
Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are increasingly proposed for communication and in-orbit computing, achieving low-latency global services. However, their sustainability remains largely unexamined. This paper investigates the carbon…
With the upcoming launch of large constellations of satellites in the low-Earth orbit (LEO) region it will become important to organize the physical space occupied by the different operating satellites in order to minimize critical…
Astrometry as a technique has so far proved of limited utility when employed as either a follow-up tool or to independently search for planetary mass companions orbiting nearby stars. However, this is bound to change during the next decade.…
Earth remains the only known example of a planet with technology, and future projections of Earth's trajectory provide a basis and motivation for approaching the search for extraterrestrial technospheres. Conventional approaches toward…
Scientometric techniques have been remarkably successful at mapping science but they face important difficulties when mapping research for societal problems possibly because they they are derived only from scientific documents and thus do…
Like any industry, space activities generate pressures on the environment and strives towards more sustainable activities. A consensus among the European industrial stakeholders and national agencies in the Space sector is emerging on the…
A simple metric can be used to determine whether a planet or exoplanet can clear its orbital zone during a characteristic time scale, such as the lifetime of the host star on the main sequence. This criterion requires only estimates of star…
The global climate crisis poses new risks to humanity, and with them, new challenges to the practices of professional astronomy. Avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of global warming by more than 1.5 degrees requires an immediate…
Astronomy produces extremely large data sets from ground-based telescopes, space missions, and simulation. The volume and complexity of these rich data sets require new approaches and advanced tools to understand the information contained…
This article will summarize the workshop proceedings of a workshop conducted at the University of Missouri that addressed the use of multi-omics fused with geospatial information to assess and improve the precision and environmental…
The literature on ethics and sustainability in mathematics and its education is increasingly complex and fragmented, potentially leading to communication breakdowns between different scholarly traditions. To address this, the paper…
Since the late 1950s, when the first artificial satellite was launched, the number of Resident Space Objects has steadily increased. It is estimated that around one million objects larger than one cm are currently orbiting the Earth, with…
We discuss how entropy bounds, which are not respected in the standard cosmology, constrain the parameters of a previously suggested cosmology with a finite total mass. In that alternative cosmology the matter density was postulated to be a…
Research infrastructures have been identified as an important source of greenhouse gas emissions of astronomical research. Based on a comprehensive inventory of 1,211 ground-based observatories and space missions, we assessed the evolution…
The motion of astronomical bodies and the centre of mass of the system is not always well perceived by students. One of the struggles is the conceptual change of reference frame, which is the same that held back the acceptance of the…