Related papers: Magnitude systems in old star catalogues
The suggestion that there is a maximum luminosity (maximum power) in nature has a long and somewhat convoluted history. Though this idea is commonly attributed to Freeman Dyson, he was actually much more circumspect in his views. What is…
We investigate the assembly of groups and clusters of galaxies using the Millennium dark matter simulation and the associated gas simulations and semi-analytic catalogues of galaxies. In particular, in order to find an observable quantity…
Despite the tremendous advance of observational cosmology, the value of the Hubble constant ($H_0$) is still controversial (the so called ``Hubble tension'') because of the inconsistency between local/late-time measurements and those…
The high precision of the latest version of the planetary ephemeris EPM2011 enables one to explore more accurately a variety of small effects in the solar system. The processing of about 678 thousand of position observations of planets and…
In addition to the large systematic differences arising from assumptions about the stellar mass-to-light ratio, the massive end of the stellar mass function is rather sensitive to how one fits the light profiles of the most luminous…
The discussion of cosmological parameters used to be a source of embarrassment to cosmologists. Today, measurements of the cosmological parameters are leading the way into the era of precision cosmology. The CMB temperature is measured to…
We use evolutionary calculations presented in a recent paper (Cassisi et al. 1998) to predict B,V,I magnitudes for stars in galactic globulars. The effect of the adopted mixing length on stellar magnitudes and colors is discussed, showing…
A new reduction of the astrometric data as produced by the Hipparcos mission has been published, claiming that the accuracies for nearly all stars brighter than magnitude $\mathrm{Hp}=8$ are improved, by up to a factor 4, compared to the…
The masses of star clusters range over seven decades, from ten up to one hundred million solar masses. Remarkably, clusters with masses in the range 10^4 to 10^6 solar mases show no systematic variation of radius with mass. However, recent…
All galaxies are thought to reside within large halos of dark matter, whose properties can only be determined from indirect observations. The formation and assembly of galaxies is determined from the interplay between these dark matter…
We present some preliminary results from an on-going study of the evolution of stellar populations in rich clusters of galaxies. This sample contains core line-strength measurements from 183 galaxies with b_J <= 19.5 from four clusters with…
Galaxy systems with large magnitude gaps - defined as the difference in magnitude between the central galaxy and the brightest satellite in the central region - have been claimed to have earlier formation histories. In this study we measure…
The parameters of the original log-normal mass spectrum of primordial black holes (PBH) are approximately adjusted on the basis of existing observational data on supermassive black holes in the galactic centers and the mass distribution of…
Johannes Hevelius's 1662 Mercurius in Sole Visus Gedani contains a table of magnitudes and apparent telescopic diameters of nineteen stars. The data conform to a simple model, suggesting that Hevelius produced what is essentially a table of…
We describe observations in the nearby universe (<100 Mpc) with a 10-m or larger space-based telescope having imaging and spectral capabilities in the range 912-9000 \AA that would enable advances in the fields of massive stars, young…
In this article, we consider the continuous analog of the celebrated Mandelbrot star equation with lognormal weights. Mandelbrot introduced this equation to characterize the law of multiplicative cascades. We show existence and uniqueness…
Magnitude of a finite metric space and the related notion of magnitude functions on metric spaces is an active area of research in algebraic topology. Magnitude originally arose in the context of biology, where it represents the number of…
The relation between the maximum stellar mass in a very young cluster (mmax) and the total stellar mass of the cluster (Mecl), known as the mmax-Mecl relation, remains debated in the literature. To test the validity of this relation, we…
Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomer of antiquity. However, his fame is due, more than to what he has done, or said, or written, to what the scientists of some generation or of a few cen-turies later have written of him: above…
A century ago, in 1911 and 1913, Plummer and then Reynolds introduced their models to describe the radial distribution of stars in `nebulae'. This article reviews the progress since then, providing both an historical perspective and a…