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Modern society has led many people to become consumers of data unlike previous generations. How this shift in the way information is communicated and received - including in areas of science - and affects perception and comprehension is…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
Authorship of scientific articles has profoundly changed from early science until now. If once upon a time a paper was authored by a handful of authors, scientific collaborations are much more prominent on average nowadays. As authorship…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
Timescales in astronomy comprise the largest range of any scientific discipline. In the construction of physical models, this circumstance may both be a blessing and a curse. For example, galaxy evolution occurs on typical timescales of…
Creativity is individual, and it is social. The social aspects of creativity have become of increasing interest as systems have emerged that mobilize large numbers of people to engage in creative tasks. We examine research related to…
We review a cosmology in which particles are fluctuationally created from a background Zero Point Field. This cosmology is consistent with recent observations of an ever expanding and accelerating universe, as also the recently confirmed…
Massive stars like company. Here, we provide a brief overview of progresses made over the last 5 years by a number of medium and large surveys. These results provide new insights on the observed and intrinsic multiplicity properties of main…
In spite of the almost all-encompassing variability of Be stars, surveys play a steadily increasing role in complementing the insights gained from single-star studies. The definition of classical Be stars as recently augmented by…
The possible discovery of astronomical effects due to precession - such as the shift in the declination of heliacal raising of bright stars or the precession of the equinoxes - is reviewed for various ancient cultures in the world. Although…
The epitome of acausal or anti-chronological behaviour would be to see a clock running backwards in time. In this essay we point out that this is indeed possible, but there is no problem with causality. What you see isn't what is really…
Today's science provides quite a lean picture of time as a mere geometric evolution parameter. I argue that time is much richer. In particular, I argue that besides the geometric time, there is creative time, when objective chance events…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
Nowadays, as the quantity of data to process began to rise, so did the need for a method to discern what pieces of information could be useful for the user; in response, researchers focused their efforts on improving the already existing…
The determination of the star-formation history of the Universe is a key goal of modern cosmology, as it is crucial to our understanding of how structure in the Universe forms and evolves. A picture has built up over recent years,…
The overall frequency and other statistical properties of binary systems suggest that star formation is intrinsically a complex and chaotic process, and that most binaries and single stars actually originate from the decay of multiple…
Our understanding of ordinary matter is remarkably accurate and complete, but it is based on principles that are very strange and unfamiliar. As I'll explain, we've come to understand matter to be a Music of the Void, in a remarkably…
The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand it is intended to serve as a gentle introduction to the topic of creative telescoping, from a practical point of view; for this purpose its application to several problems is exemplified.…