Related papers: Astronomers Getting Less Creative Over Time Is Why…
While both society and astronomy have evolved greatly over the past fifty years, the academic institutions and incentives that shape our field have remained largely stagnant. As a result, the astronomical community is faced with several…
Much progress has been achieved in the age-dating of old stellar systems, and even of individual stars in the field, in the more than sixty years since the evolution of low-mass stars was first correctly described. In this paper, I provide…
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…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
This paper is a discussion of the physics of magnification in telescopes. Special attention is given to the question of whether telescopes magnify stars. Telescopes do magnify star images, although opinions to the contrary abound.
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
Observations of intensely bright star-forming galaxies both close by and in the distant Universe at first glance seem to emphasize their similarity. But look a little closer, and differences emerge.
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
In the last few decades, reading the literature, we realized that we Astronomers have a strong preference to undertake very ambitious projects, and search for answers to the most fundamental questions in the history of the entire Universe.…
Astronomy is one of the most data-intensive of the sciences. Data technology is accelerating the quality and effectiveness of its research, and the rate of astronomical discovery is higher than ever. As a result, many view astronomy as…
The determination of chemical abundances from stellar spectra is considered a mature field of astrophysics. Digital spectra of stars are recorded and processed with standard techniques, much like samples in the biological sciences.…
The field of astronomy is starting to generate more data than can be managed, served and processed by current techniques. This paper has outlined practices for developing next-generation tools and techniques for surviving this data tsunami,…
An emerging theme in modern astrophysics is the connection between astronomical observations and the underlying physical phenomena that drive our cosmos. Both the mechanisms responsible for the observed astrophysical phenomena and the tools…
Our history of understanding galaxy formation could be traced through the development of individual ideas. A cynic might be tempted to suggest that new catchphrases are developed at a faster rate than genuine progress is made.
Over the last half-century quantitative stellar spectroscopy has made great progress. However, most stellar abundance analyses today still employ rather simplified models, which can introduce severe systematic errors swamping the…
Evidence for cosmic down-sizing has been growing over the last decade. It is now clear that the major star-forming epoch for the largest galaxies occurred earlier than for smaller galaxies. This not only runs counter to the popular…