Related papers: Astronomy and the Fall of Babylon
In late antiquity and throughout the middle ages, the positions of stars on the celestial sphere were obtained from the star catalogue of Ptolemaios. A catalogue based on new measurements appeared in 1437, with positions by Ulugh Beg, and…
TrES-5b is one of only three ultra-hot Jupiters (UHJs) with suggestions of a possibly decreasing orbital period that have persisted through multiple independent analyses (G. Maciejewski et al. 2021; S. R. Hagey et al. 2022; E. S. Ivshina &…
The ESA space mission Euclid was launched on July 1st, 2023 and is undergoing its science verification phase. In this invited review we show that Euclid means a before and an after for our understanding of ultra-cool dwarfs and…
Ever since it was published by Neugebauer and Sachs in 1945, the Old Babylonian tablet known as Plimpton 322 has been the subject of numerous studies leading to different and often conflicting interpretations of it. Overall, the tablet is…
The number of planets in the solar system over the last three centuries has, perhaps surprisingly, been less of a fixed value than one would think it should be. In this paper, we look at the specific case of Vulcan, which was both a planet…
The bisection of trapezoids by transversal lines has many examples in Babylonian mathematics. In this article, we study a similar problem in Elamite mathematics, inscribed on a clay tablet held in the collection of the Louvre Museum and…
If one wants to translate the heliocentric picture of planets moving uniformly on circular orbits about the sun to the perspective of a terrestrial observer, using classical (ancient) geometric means only, one is naturally led to the…
Ancient mesoamerican cultures built a short ritual 260 day calendar and used it for daily routinary life. Using simple arithmetic calculations it is first shown that by forcing the introduction of the the fundamental number 13 to calculate…
In the past, the Arabs in Al-Hara Zone used many stars to deduce the seasons of the year and also to deduce the roads, at that time this was the most convenient way to figure their ways and to know the time of the year they have to travel…
Some few hundred million years after the big bang the Universe was illuminated by the first stars and galaxies thereby bringing an end to the cosmological dark ages. Since the installation of WFC3 on the Hubble Space Telescope our ability…
Two types of data sets for investigation of solar- modulated cycles in the climate of Bulgaria during the last ~ 200 years has been used in this study: 1. Instrumental data for the rainfalls and temperatures in 26 stations during the period…
Only seven transits of Venus have been observed and studied up to now since the first astronomical observations with the telescope: 1639, 1761-69, 1874-82 and 2004-12. The measurement of the Astronomical Unit has been one of the main goal…
The data of 2012 transit of Venus are compared with the ones of 2004. The thickness of the atmosphere of Venus, its aureole and the effect of oblateness and other asphericities in the figure of the Sun are taken into consideration, as well…
This work is related to different questions within cosmology. The principal idea herein is to develop cosmological knowledge making use of the analyses of observational data in order to find the values of the matter density Omega_m and…
Making observable predictions for cosmic inflation requires determining when the wavenumbers of astrophysical interest today exited the Hubble radius during the inflationary epoch. These instants are commonly evaluated using the slow-roll…
This paper presents an analysis of the star atlas included in the medieval Chinese manuscript (Or.8210/S.3326), discovered in 1907 by the archaeologist Aurel Stein at the Silk Road town of Dunhuang and now held in the British Library.…
The blinding of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI in Constantinople in August 797 and his overthrow by his mother Eirene, who then until 802 ruled as first female emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was used as legitimation for the…
Some examples of the events associated with falls of rocks and iron terrestrial origin from the sky are considered (in scientific publications they are often called as meteor-wrongs or pseudo-meteorites). Their possible connections with…
Abridged: The golden age of astrophysics is upon us with both grand discoveries (extra-solar planets, dark matter, dark energy) and precision cosmology. Fundamental understanding of the working of stars and galaxies is within reach, thanks…
The current state of cosmology is easy to summarize: a very successful standard model -- the hot big-bang cosmology -- that accounts for the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec until the present; bold ideas based upon early-Universe…