Related papers: The Olbers Conjecture, Revisited
The classical formulation of "Olbers' Paradox" consists in looking for an explanation of the fact that the sky at night is dark. We use the experimental datum of the nocturnal darkness in order to put constraints on a Newtonian cosmological…
Ground-based optical astronomy necessarily involves sensing the light of astronomical objects along with the contributions of many natural sources ranging from the Earth's atmosphere to cosmological light. In addition, astronomers have long…
Shown is that contrary to common intuition, even an arbitrarily weak attenuating mechanism is sufficient to make the background sky quite dark independently of the size of the universe and the Hubble expansion. Further shown is that such an…
We investigate the constraints that Olbers Paradox, applied to the Zodiacal Background as measured from space, sets on outer solar system objects. If extended to very faint limits, R = 40--50 mag, the steep optical luminosity function (LF)…
The selective light absorption in space has been raised in astronomical literature. The substance producing the absorption must have some mass; thus the question is how large it is. We develop a dynamical model of the Milky Way system,…
There has been remarkable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies of galaxy formation and evolution. Largely due to a combination of deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging, Keck spectroscopy, and COBE far-IR background…
We apply the sky brightness modelling technique introduced and developed by Roy Garstang to high-resolution DMSP-OLS satellite measurements of upward artificial light flux and to GTOPO30 digital elevation data in order to predict the…
Over the past decade, a consensus picture has emerged in which roughly a quarter of the universe consists of dark matter. The observational evidence for the existence of dark matter is reviewed: rotation curves of galaxies, weak lensing…
An interesting consequence of the modern cosmological paradigm is the spatial infinity of the universe. When coupled with naturalistic understanding of the origin of life and intelligence, which follows the basic tenets of astrobiology, and…
The expansion of our Universe is accelerating, due to dark energy. But the nature of dark energy has been a mystery since its discovery at the end of the past century. In Research Highlight https://doi.org/10.1002/ntls.20220003 , Justin…
Could we enjoy starry skies in our cities again? Arguably yes. The actual number of visible stars will depend, among other factors, on the spatial density of the overall city light emissions. In this paper it is shown that reasonably dark…
The anthropic explanation for the peculiarly small observed value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ argues that this value promotes the formation of stars, planets, and ultimately of observers such as ourselves. I show that a…
The evolution of the number density of galaxies in the universe, and thus also the total number of galaxies, is a fundamental question with implications for a host of astrophysical problems including galaxy evolution and cosmology. However…
We present a new determination of the surface brightness of our Galaxy at the Solar Neighbourhood as observed from outside the Galaxy. We rely on various existing optical and infra-red surveys to obtain a multiwavelength estimate. On the…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
The sky observed by space telescopes in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be dominated by stray light from multiple sources including the Earth, Sun and Moon. This stray light presents a significant challenge to missions that aim to make a secure…
The coherence of the interaction of light with a collisionless gas (Einstein 1917) founds the theory of gas lasers. It is, for the understanding of universe, a simpler and more powerful tool than the big bang which requires questionable…
The star formation history derived from ultraviolet and H$\alpha$ data, without correction for dust extinction, on the one hand, and from far infrared and submillimetre data, on the other, is investigated. The latter estimates are found to…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain many independent gravitational effects at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. This review describes the…
The interpretation of observations over different wavelength domains, which now exist over a large fraction of the sky, will be used to determine relationships between a nebula and its' illuminating source. The illuminating source of a high…