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The arena of investigation of star formation and its scaling laws is slowly, but consistently, shifting from the realm of luminous galaxies to that of faint ones and to sub--galactic regions, as existing and new facilities enable…
The work of astronomers is getting more complex and advanced as the progress of computer development occurs. With improved computing capabilities and increased data flow, more sophisticated software is required in order to interpret, and…
From the moment astronomical observations are made the resulting data products begin to grow stale. Even if perfect binary copies are preserved through repeated timely migration to more robust storage media, data standards evolve and new…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…
Today, professional instrumentation is dominated by heavily oversubscribed telescopes which focus mainly on a limited number of "fashionable" research topics. As a result, time acquisition for massive star research, including extended…
Unfettered access to dark night skies is rapidly diminishing, due to light pollution and satellite mega-constellations tracks. Scientists should wake up and do more to stand up to Big Light and Big Space and preserve this natural resource.
The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of…
How did neutrino astronomy evolve? Are there any useful lessons for astronomers and physicists embarking on new observational ventures today? We answer the first question; the reader can can decide if there are any useful parallels for…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
Multi-messenger astronomy has experienced an explosive development in the past few years. While not being a particularly young field, it has recently attracted a lot of attention by several major discoveries and unprecedented observation…
This paper explores the evolution of the so called "anthropic reasoning" in a historical perspective. It takes under scrutiny the appearance of "anthropic" considerations in various stages of modern cosmology, focusing also on some very…
Creativity is a deeply debated topic, as this concept is arguably quintessential to our humanity. Across different epochs, it has been infused with an extensive variety of meanings relevant to that era. Along these, the evolution of…
Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction…
There is some experimental evidence that some stars are older than the Universe in General Relativity based cosmology. In TGD based cosmology the paradox has explanation. Photons can be either topologically condensed on background spacetime…
How special (or not) is the epoch we are living in? What is the appropriate reference class for embedding the observations made at the present time? How probable -- or else -- is anything we observe in the fulness of time? Contemporary…
The standard view that creativity entails both originality and appropriateness leads to the paradox that experts who converge on one optimal solution are rated as no more creative than beginners who give many original solutions. This paper…
The age of an individual star cannot be measured, only estimated through mostly model-dependent or empirical methods, and no single method works well for a broad range of stellar types or for a full range in age. This review presents a…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
Evolved stars dominate galactic spectra, enrich the galactic medium, expand to change their planetary systems, eject winds of a complex nature, produce spectacular nebulae and illuminate them, and transfer material between binary…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…