相关论文: Light pollution is skyrocketing

We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…

High-contrast observations in optical and infrared astronomy are defined as any observation requiring a technique to reveal a celestial object of interest that is in such close angular proximity to another source brighter by a factor of at…

Astronomers measure cosmic distances to objects beyond our own galaxy using standard candles: objects of known intrinsic brightness, whose apparent brightnesses in the sky are then taken as an indication of their distances from the…

We study light variability of gravitationally magnified high-redshift star clusters induced by a foreground population of microlenses. This arises as the incoherent superposition of light variations from a large number of source stars…

Indirect detection is the search for the particle nature of dark matter with astrophysical probes. Manifestly, it exists right at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, and the discovery potential for dark matter can be…

Deep surface photometry of disk galaxies at optical and near-IR wavelengths have revealed faint halos with colours much too red to be reconciled with the resolved stellar populations detected in the halos of the Milky Way or M31.…

Using open source data, we observe the fascinating dynamics of nighttime light. Following a global economic regime shift, the planetary center of light can be seen moving eastwards at a pace of about 60 km per year. Introducing spatial…

We extend the method introduced by Cinzano et al. (2000a) to map the artificial sky brightness in large territories from DMSP satellite data, in order to map the naked eye star visibility and telescopic limiting magnitudes. For these…

The development of surveys which will be able to cover a large region of the sky several times per year will allow the massive detection of transient events taking place in timescales of years. In addition, the projected full digitalization…

Dark matter particles need not be completely stable, and in fact they may be decaying now. We consider this possibility in the frameworks of universal extra dimensions and supersymmetry with very late decays of WIMPs to Kaluza-Klein…

Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope…

Direct imaging surveys have found that long-period super-Jupiters are rare. By contrast, recent modeling of the widespread gaps in protoplanetary disks revealed by ALMA suggests an abundant population of smaller Neptune to Jupiter-mass…

The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly from the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and indirectly, from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. Dark energy contributes about 2/3 of the…

Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the…

The rise of the cosmic ray positron fraction with energy, as first observed with high confidence by PAMELA, implies that a large flux of high energy positrons has been recently (or is being currently) injected into the local volume of the…

Dust is an essential ingredient of galaxies, determining the physical and chemical conditions in the interstellar medium. Several complementary observational evidences indicate that the cosmic dust mass density significantly drops from…

Under stable atmospheric conditions, the zenithal brightness of the urban sky varies throughout the night following the time course of the anthropogenic emissions of light. Different types of artificial light sources (e.g. streetlights,…

We present night sky brightness measurements performed at the Vienna University Observatory and at the Leopold-Figl-Observatorium fuer Astrophysik, which is located about 35km to the southwest of Vienna. The measurements have been performed…

Long-term monitoring of the evolution of the artificial night sky brightness is a key tool for developing science-informed public policies and assessing the efficacy of light pollution mitigation measures. Detecting the underlying…

We present spectroscopic measurements on the night sky of Xinglong Observatory for a period of 12 years from 2004 to 2015. The spectra were obtained on moonless clear nights using the OMR spectrograph mounted on a 2.16-m reflector with a…