Related papers: Solar Oblateness from Archimedes to Dicke
The Sun is the most studied of all stars, and thus constitutes a benchmark for stellar models. However, our vision of the Sun is still incomplete, as illustrated by the current debate on its chemical composition. The problem reaches far…
Earth's analemma is the lopsided figure eight marked out over a year by the position of the Sun in the sky observed at the same clock time each day. It shows how solar time deviates from clock time. The analemma's shape results from the…
Recently published, precise stellar photometry of 72 Sun-like stars obtained at the Fairborn Observatory between 1993 and 2017 is used to set limits on the solar forcing of Earth's atmosphere of $\pm$ 4.5 W m$^{-2}$ since 1750. This…
Unresolved Doppler velocity measurements are not homogenous across the solar disc (Brookes et al. 1978). We consider one cause of the inhomogeneity that originates from the BiSON instrumentation itself: the intensity of light observed from…
When an exoplanet passes behind its host star, we can measure the time of the occultation, its depth, and its color. In this chapter we describe how these observables can be used to deduce physical characteristics of the planet such as its…
Given a solar luminosity L_Ar = 0.75 L_0 at the beginning of the Archean 3.8 Gyr ago, where L_0 is the present-day one, if the heliocentric distance r of the Earth was r_Ar = 0.956 r_0, the solar irradiance would have been as large as I_Ar…
The satellite missions Hipparcos and Gaia by the European Space Agency will together bring a decrease of astrometric errors by a factor 10000, four orders of magnitude, more than was achieved during the preceding 500 years. This modern…
Minor bodies of the solar system can be used to measure the spectrum of the Sun as a star by observing sunlight reflected by their surfaces. To perform an accurate measurement of the radial velocity of the Sun as a star by this method, it…
Planets may be rotationally flattened, and their oblateness thus provide useful information on their formation and evolution. Here we develop a new algorithm that can compute the transit light curve due to an oblate planet very efficiently…
Differences between observed and theoretical eigenfrequencies of the Sun have characteristics which identify them as arising predominantly from properties of the oscillations in the vicinity of the solar surface: in the super-adiabatic,…
Kepler short-cadence photometry of 2347 stars with effective temperatures in the range 6000-10000 K was used to search for the presence of solar-like oscillations. The aim is to establish the location of the hot end of the stochastic…
In 1911 Einstein proposed that light-bending by the Sun's gravitational field could be measured during a total solar eclipse. The first opportunity in which this measurement would be tried, was during the total solar eclipse of October 10,…
In previous work we identified six Sun-like stars observed by Kepler with exceptionally clear asteroseismic signatures of rotation. Here, we show that five of these stars exhibit surface variability suitable for measuring rotation. In order…
The iodine-cell technique, which is known to be efficient in precisely establishing Doppler velocity shifts, was once applied by the author to measuring the solar differential rotation based on full-disk spectroscopic observations (Takeda…
From 1998 to 2003 the CCD Solar Astrolabe of the Observatorio Nacional in Rio de Janeiro made more than 20000 observations of the Solar Semidiameter. In the present work similar corrections for the observational results of 2002 and 2003…
Astronomical observations were used as a marker for time and the Calendar from ancient times. A more subtle calibration of epochs is thrown up by an observation of the position of the solstices and equinoxes, because these points shift in…
The Sun's net radiative output varies on timescales of minutes to gigayears. Direct measurements of the total solar irradiance (TSI) show changes in the spatially- and spectrally-integrated radiant energy on timescales as short as minutes…
The Eclipse Mapping Method is an indirect imaging technique that transforms the shape of the eclipse light curve into a map of the surface brightness distribution of the occulted regions. Three decades of application of this technique to…
We examine recent astronomical data to assess whether the sun and Solar System possess anomalous properties compared to other stars and exoplanetary systems, providing context for astrobiology research. Utilising data primarily from large…
Recently it has been suggested to use the perigee of the proposed LARES/WEBER-SAT satellite in order to measure the secular precession which would be induced on such Keplerian orbital element by a weak-field modification of gravity…