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We list a few things that we do not understand about stars and that most people ignore. These are all hard problems. We can learn more cosmology by working on them to reduce the systematic errors they introduce than by trying to derive…

We review the present status of cosmological discoveries and how these confirm our modern cosmological model, but at the same time we try to focus on its weaknesses and inconsistencies with an historical perspective, and foresee how the…

The study of open clusters has a classic feel to it since the subject predates anyone alive today. Despite the age of this topic, I show via an ADS search that its relevance and importance in astronomy has grown faster in the last few…

Astronomy and related fields are at the forefront of science and technology; answering fundamental questions and driving innovation. Although blue-skies research like astronomy rarely contributes directly with tangible outcomes on a short…

Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design,…

In the past decade, observational cosmology has had one of the most exciting periods in the past century. The precision with which we have been able to measure cosmological parameters has increased tremendously, while at the same time, we…

The evolution of irregular galaxies is examined from two points of view: on the one hand, models of galactic chemical evolution have been computed and their predictions compared with the corresponding observational data on the element…

Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…

The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…

In the last years, the need for automated real-time detection and classification of astronomical transients began to be more impelling. Better technologies involve a higher number of detected candidates and an automated classification will…

Scientific discovery is mediated by ideas that, after being formulated in hypotheses, can be tested, validated, and quantified before they eventually lead to accepted concepts. Computer-mediated discovery in astrophysics is no exception,…

The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…

We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…

It has long been accepted that the cosmos determine our personalities, relationships, and even our fate. Unlike our condensed matter colleagues - who regularly use quantum mechanics to determine the healing properties of crystals -…

Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…

The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…

Each time diffusion of elements is invoked in explaining abundance anomalies in a star, this supposes implicitly that a stratification process is in progress somewhere in that star. This means also, that the element abundances can still be…

From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…

In this paper we analyze methodological and philosophical implications of algorithmic aspects of unconventional computation. At first, we describe how the classical algorithmic universe developed and analyze why it became closed in the…

We note that in general there exist two basic aspects in any branch of physics, including cosmology - one dealing with the attributes of basic constituents and forces of nature, the other dealing with how structures arise from them and how…