Related papers: The 1908 Tunguska Event and Bright Nights

The dominant background for observations of gamma-rays in the energy region above 50 GeV with Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes are cosmic-ray events. The images of most of the cosmic ray showers look significantly different from…

Diffuse glow has been observed around brightly lit cities in nighttime satellite imagery since at least the first publication of large scale maps in the late 1990s. In the literature, this has often been assumed to be an error related to…

Sunspots have been known in the West since Galileo Galilei and Thomas Harriot first used telescopes to observe the Sun nearly four centuries ago; they have been known to the Chinese for more than two thousand years. They appear as…

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are unpredictable and brief flashes of gamma rays that occur about once a day in random locations in the sky. Since gamma rays do not penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, they are detected by satellites, which…

The reason for the horizontal turn of the Tunguska-1908 bolide trajectory remains difficult to understand. It finds explanation, however, in the New Explosive Cosmogony of minor bodies as having been caused by an explosion of a part (M up…

Observations were made of the optical afterglow of GRB 051028 with the Lulin observatory's 1.0 m telescope and the WIDGET robotic telescope system. R band photometric data points were obtained on 2005 October 28 (UT), or 0.095-0.180 days…

Two giant flares were observed on 5 March 1979 and 27 August 1998 from the soft gamma-ray repeaters SGR 0526-66 and SGR 1900+14, respectively. The striking similarity between these remarkable bursts strongly implies a common nature. We show…

We reconsider the case of the geodesic motion of a massive and massless beam of test particles in a gravitational wave. In particular, we use a direct Lagrangian approach which simplifies the calculation. Our findings differ partly from…

Over the past century a succession of five different independent astronomical phenomena have been discovered, each appearing to be the result of a common underlying cause that also produces an unaccounted-for acceleration that is: quite…

In this talk, after briefly reviewing some historical remarks concerning strange stars, the achievements in physics and dynamical behavior of strange stars are discussed. Especially, various observational effects in distinguishing strange…

We report on observations of GRB 080503, a short gamma-ray burst with very bright extended emission (about 30 times the gamma-ray fluence of the initial spike) in conjunction with a thorough comparison to other short Swift events. In spite…

We report the observation of the first gravitational microlensing event in a sparse stellar field, involving the brightest (V=11.4 mag) andclosest (~ 1 kpc) source star to date. This event was discovered by an amateurastronomer, A. Tago, on…

The paper contains the results of the polarization measurements of twilight sky background during the wintertime including the epoch of Quadrantids activity in January 2008 and 2009 in Crimea (Ukraine). Analysis of the twilight sky…

On June 30, 1908, at about 0h 14.5m UTC, the Tunguska Event (TE) occurred, most likely caused by the fall of a small stony asteroid of about 50-80 meters in diameter over the basin of the Tunguska River (Central Siberia). This paper will…

This paper presents time series observations and analysis of broadband night sky airglow intensity 4 September 2018 through 30 April 2020. Data were obtained at 5 sites spanning more than 8500 km during the historically deep minimum of…

We use the cannonball model of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) and public data from the first day of observations of GRB 090618 to predict its X-ray and optical lightcurves until very late times, and, in particular, the emergence of a photometric…

This paper discusses the historical evidence for the light jets from the central Super Massive Black Hole of Galaxy in the 4th and 14th centuries. We suggest that the apparitions of a "lightening cross" recorded in 312, 351, 1317 and 1377…

Astronomical observations in the electromagnetic window - microwave, radio and optical - have revealed that most of the Universe is dark. The only reason we know that dark matter exists is because of its gravitational influence on luminous…

We report the earliest detection of an extremely bright optical afterglow of the gamma-ray burst (GRB) 030329 using a 30cm-telescope at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo, JAPAN). Our observation started 67 minutes after the burst, and…

The Swift discovered GRB080319B was by far the most distant source ever observed at naked eye brightness, reaching a peak apparent magnitude of 5.3 at a redshift of z=0.937. We present our late-time optical (HST, Gemini & VLT) and X-ray…