Related papers: Babylonian and Indian Astronomy: Early Connections

While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…

How do galaxies form and evolve? This is one of the most puzzling questions in astronomy. Galaxy assembly takes place throughout the entire history of the Universe, but our understanding of it is hampered by the unfortunate fact that we can…

The Copernican Principle (which says the Earth and sun are not unique) should have observational consequences and thus be testable. Galileo Galilei thought he could measure the true angular diameters of stars with his telescope; according…

Most planetary systems -- including our own -- are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system architecture. This paper develops an orbit-averaged formalism to characterize the cluster's…

Many exoplanets have orbital characteristics quite different from those seen in our own solar system, including planets locked in orbital resonances and planets on orbits that are elliptical or highly inclined from their host star's spin…

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…

The Sun has long been considered a constant star, to the extent that its total irradiance was termed the solar constant. It required radiometers in space to detect the small variations in solar irradiance on timescales of the solar rotation…

Ratios and coefficients are used to simplify calculations. For geometric usage these values also called function values. Like in Egypt also in Babylon such a value system can be shown. The reconstructed calculation sequence, of the Plimpton…

Astronomers have come to recognize the benefits of photonics, often in combination with optical systems, in solving longstanding experimental problems in Earth-based astronomy. Here, we explore some of the recent advances made possible by…

Binary/multiple status can affect stars at all stages of their lifetimes: evolution onto the main sequence, properties on the main sequence, and subsequent evolution. 5 $M_\odot$ stars have provided a wealth of information about the binary…

The majority of stars form in star clusters and many are thought to have planetary companions. We demonstrate that multi-planet systems are prone to instabilities as a result of frequent stellar encounters in these star clusters much more…

Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…

Influenced by the renaissance of general relativity that came to pass in the 1950s, the character of cosmology fundamentally changed in the 1960s as it became a well-established empirical science. Although observations went to dominate its…

Radio astronomy and active exploration of space are peers: both began by efforts of enthusiasts in the 1930s and got a major technological boost in the 1940s-50s. Thus, for the sake of a brief review at this very special conference, it is…

This article traces the birth and growth of solar physics at the Kodaikanal Observatory of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, India. A major discovery took place here in 1909 by John Evershed who detected radial outflow of…

Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…

A major problem in extragalactic astronomy is the inability to distinguish in a robust, physical, and model independent way how galaxy populations are related to each other and to their formation histories. A similar, but distinct, and also…

This review concentrates almost entirely on globular star clusters. It emphasises the increasing realisation that few of the traditional problems of star cluster astronomy can be studied in isolation: the influence of the Galaxy affects…

This paper expounds very innovative results achieved between the mid-14th century and the beginning of the 16th century by Indian astronomers belonging to the so-called "M\=adhava school". These results were in keeping with researches in…

Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…