Related papers: Le Soleil se l\`evera-t-il demain ?
The variable Sun is the most likely candidate for natural forcing of past climate change on time scales of 50 to 1000 years. Evidence for this understanding is that the terrestrial climate correlates positively with solar activity. During…
Since the formulation of the problem by Newton, and during three centuries, astronomers and mathematicians have sought to demonstrate the stability of the Solar System. Thanks to the numerical experiments of the last two decades, we know…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
The physical origin of the leap second is discussed in terms of the new gravity model. The calculated time shift of the earth rotation around the sun for one year amounts to $\displaystyle{\Delta T \simeq 0.621 s/ year}$. According to the…
The idea of a planetary origin for the solar cycle dates back to the nineteenth century. Despite unsurmounted problems, it is still advocated by some. Stefani, Giesecke, and Weier (2019) thus recently proposed a scenario based on this idea.…
We have proposed a model to obtain the length of the day and month at any geologic time. The day is found to increase by 0.002 sec/century since the seventeenth century. The lengthening of the day is attributed entirely to the increasing…
Many statistical models have likelihoods which are intractable: it is impossible or too expensive to compute the likelihood exactly. In such settings, a common approach is to replace the likelihood with an approximation, and proceed with…
The purpose of this paper is to explore a resolution for the Faint Young Sun Paradox that has been mostly rejected by the community, namely the possibility of a somewhat more massive young Sun with a large mass loss rate sustained for two…
The reconstruction and prediction of solar activity is one of the current problems in dynamo theory and global climate modeling. We estimate the Total Solar Irradiance for the next hundred years based on the Least Square Support Vector…
It is shown how repeated observations of the sunset from various points up a tall building can be used to determine the Earth's radius. The same observations can also be used, at some latitudes, to deduce an approximate value for the amount…
The measurement of the Sun's diameter has been first tackled by the Greek astronomers from a geometric point of view. Their estimation of ~1800", although incorrect, was not truly called into question for several centuries. The first…
The inter-relation of clouds, solar irradiance and surface temperature is complex and subject to different interpretations. Here, we continue our recent work, which related mainly to the period from 1960 to the present, back to 1900 with…
According to an ancient Indian text (c. 1700 BC?), the heavens are 1000 earth diameters away from the earth. Other texts took the sun to be halfway to the heavens, so this suggests a distance of the sun about 500 earth diameters from the…
Solar irradiance measurements are limited to the last few decades, requiring reconstructions to assess solar variability on longer timescales and its impact on Earth's climate. We present the first physics-based reconstruction of total…
Recently, Z.-W. Sun made the following conjecture: for any odd prime $p$ and odd integer $m$, $$ \frac{1}{m^2{m-1\choose (m-1)/2}}\Bigg(\sum_{k=0}^{(pm-1)/2}\frac{{2k\choose k}}{8^k}…
Why does the Sun shine? Today we know the answer to the question and we also know that earlier answers were quite wrong. The problem of the source of solar energy became an important part of physics and astronomy only with the emergence of…
Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…
In this paper we describe a simple conceptual problem, regarding the actual position of the Sun at sunset or sunrise. Although this problem can be easily explained in terms of rotating frames of references and standard Coriolis Effect, it…
A star passing within $\sim 10^4 \au$ of the Sun would trigger a comet shower that would reach the inner solar system about 0.18 Myr later. We calculate a prior probability of ~0.4% that a star has passed this close to the Sun but that the…
We have conducted a differential elemental abundance analysis of unprecedented accuracy (0.01 dex) of the Sun relative to 11 solar twins from the Hipparcos catalogue and 10 solar analogs from planet searches. We find that the Sun shows a…