Related papers: Solar Oblateness from Archimedes to Dicke

The Lense-Thirring precession of the longitude of perihelion of Mercury, as predicted by general relativity by using the value of the Sun's angular momentum S = 190 x 10^39 kg m^2 s^-1 from helioseismology, is -2.0 milliarcseconds per…

Calculations of spectral darkening and visibility functions for the brightness oscillations of the Sun resulting from global solar oscillations are presented. This has been done for a broad range of the visible and infrared continuum…

Measuring the albedo of an extrasolar planet provides insights into its atmospheric composition and its global thermal properties, including heat dissipation and weather patterns. Such a measurement requires very precise photometry of a…

We present the first global 3D simulations of thermal convection in the oblate envelopes of rapidly-rotating solar-type stars. This has been achieved by exploiting the capabilities of the new Compressible High-ORder Unstructured Spectral…

A surprisingly large amount of information on our solar system can be gained from simple measurements of the apparent angular diameters of the sun and the moon. This information includes the average density of the sun, the distance between…

Solar limb and disc spicule quasi- periodic motions have been reported for a long time, strongly suggesting that they are oscillating. In order to clear up the origin and possibly explain some solar limb and disc spicule quasi-periodic…

We study intermittency as a departure from self-similarity of the solar wind magnetic turbulence and investigate the evolution with the heliocentric distance and latitude. We use data from the Ulysses spacecraft measured during two solar…

This article reviews atmospheric changes associated with 44 solar eclipses, beginning with the first quantitative results available, from 1834 (earlier qualitative, accounts also exist). Eclipse meteorology attracted relatively few…

Using the Moon to occult the Sun, the Clementine spacecraft used its navigation cameras to map the inner zodiacal light at optical wavelengths over elongations of 3-30 degrees from the Sun. This surface brightness map is then used to infer…

We propose a method to account for the Earth oblateness effect in preliminary orbit determination of satellites in low orbits with radar observations. This method is an improvement of the one described in (Gronchi et al 2015), which uses a…

Advances in understanding of the white light faculae measured at the Royal Greenwich Observatory from 1874 to 1976 suggest that they offer a more direct measure of solar brightening by small diameter photospheric magnetic flux tubes than do…

The sunspot drawings of Johann Staudacher of 1749--1799 were used to determine the solar differential rotation in that period. These drawings of the full disk lack any indication of their orientation. We used a Bayesian estimator to obtain…

The analysis of the observational data for the secular perihelion precession of Mercury, Earth, and Mars, based on the EPM2004 ephemerides, results in new upper limits on density of dark matter in the Solar system.

As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…

Conventional explanations for observations of anomalous behaviour of mechanical systems during solar eclipses are critically reviewed. These observations include the work of Allais with paraconical pendula, those of Saxl and Allen with a…

The unprecedented precision of broadband stellar photometry achieved with the planet-hunting missions CoRoT and \textit{Kepler} initiated a new era in examining the magnetically-driven brightness variations of hundreds of thousands of…

In this work we study in details the influence of pure astronomical refraction on solar metrologic measurements made from ground-based full disk imagery and provide the tools for correcting the measurements and estimating the associated…

Stars are not perfectly spherically symmetric. They are deformed by rotation and magnetic fields. Until now, the study of stellar shapes has only been possible with optical interferometry for a few of the fastest-rotating nearby stars. We…

With only five photographs of the Sun at different dates we show that the mass of Sun can be calculated by using a telescope, a camera, and the Kepler's third law. With these photographs we are able to calculate the distance between Sun and…

Stellar seismology appears more and more as a powerful tool for a better determination of the fundamental properties of solar-type stars. However the particular case of Sun is still challenging. The helioseismic sound speed determination…