God and Time is a collection of previously unpublished essays written by leading philosophers about God's relation to time. The essays have been selected to represent current debates written between those who believe God to be atemporal and those who do not. The essays highlight issues such as how the nature of time is relevant to whether God is temporal and how God's other attributes are compatible with his mode of temporal being. By focusing on the metaphysical aspects of time and temporal existence, God and Time will make a unique contribution to the current resurgence of interest in philosophical theology within the analytic tradition.

The main focus of this book is on the interconnection of two unorthodox scientific ideas, the varying-gravity hypothesis and the expanding-earth hypothesis. As such, it provides a fascinating insight into a nearly forgotten chapter in both the history of cosmology and the history of the earth sciences. The hypothesis that the force of gravity decreases over cosmic time was first proposed by Paul Dirac in 1937. In this book the author examines in detail the historical development of Dirac's hypothesis and its consequences for the structure and history of the earth, the most important of which was that the earth must have been smaller in the past.

William Gascoigne (c.1612-44) was the inventor of the telescopic sight and micrometer (instruments crucial to the advance of astronomy). His name is now known to historians of science around the world. For some considerable time after his tragic death at the age of 32 in the English Civil War, however, it seemed as if his achievements would be consigned to oblivion. Most of his papers were lost and even the few that survived have largely disappeared. This is the story of how his work was rescued. Into this story is woven an account of the state of astronomy and optics during Gascoigne's lifetime, so that the reader can appreciate the significance of his discoveries.

This book presents three major studies covering exomoon and exoplanet detection and characterisation. Firstly, it reports the observations and analysis of the atmosphere of the hot Neptune GJ3470b, one of the lowest-mass planets with a measured atmosphere, using transmission spectroscopy techniques. The result provided improved measurements of Rayleigh scattering in the atmosphere and the first limits on additional planetary companions in the system. The second part discusses modeling a Kepler-like satellite's ability of a to detect exomoons by looking for transit timing variations and transit duration variations, demonstrating how exomoons can unambiguously be identified from such data.Lastly, the book examines the development of a state-of-the-art Galactic microlensing simulator, which has been made publicly available. It was used to compare with the largest published sample of microlensing events from the MOA-II survey.

Time is relative, situation-dependent, location- and culturally-dependent, and very much subjective. Yet we treat it as if it were objective. We share standardized time, and we are dependent on it for almost everything we do. When it comes to waking up, business meetings, transportation, finding your way via GPS, seeing friends, watching a show, we are all dependent on a standardized notion of time and time measurement. The future gives us hope and deadlines drive innovation and productivity. Time drives us forward and we talk about time - all the time! The word "time" is the most used noun in English, followed by "year" in third place and "day" in fifth. We are obsessed with it, for a lot of very good and practical reasons. The book looks at time through different perspectives (ranging from physics, history, philosophy, anthropology to art, business & politics, biology and psychology). The author's aim is to bring us closer to the nature and our experience of time by looking at it from different lenses to improve our understanding of what time is and what it is not - and to use that knowledge to improve how we organize ourselves around time. It's by better understanding time's nature and experience that we can keep the positive and productive elements of time and get rid of the unhealthy time practices in our lives.

This thesis develops new and powerful methods for identifying planetary signals in the presence of "noise" generated by stellar activity, and explores the physical origin of stellar intrinsic variability, using unique observations of the Sun seen as a star. In particular, it establishes that the intrinsic stellar radial-velocity variations mainly arise from suppression of photospheric convection by magnetic fields. With the advent of powerful telescopes and instruments we are now on the verge of discovering real Earth twins in orbit around other stars. The intrinsic variability of the host stars themselves, however, currently remains the main obstacle to determining the masses of such small planets. The methods developed here combine Gaussian-process regression for modeling the correlated signals arising from evolving active regions on a rotating star, and Bayesian model selection methods for distinguishing genuine planetary signals from false positives produced by stellar magnetic activity. The findings of this thesis represent a significant step towards determining the masses of potentially habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars.

Winner of the 2021 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize for Historical Astronomy In Decoding the Stars, Ileana Chinnici offers an account of the life of the Jesuit scientist Angelo Secchi (1818-1878). In addition to providing an invaluable account of Secchi's life and work-something that has been sorely lacking in the English-language scholarship-this biography will be especially stimulating for those interested in the evolution of astrophysics as a discipline from the nineteenth century onward. Despite his eclecticism, reminiscent of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Secchi was in many ways a very modern scientist: open to innovation and cooperation, and a promoter of popularization and citizen science. Secchi also appears fully inserted in the cultural context of his time: he participated in philosophical and scientific debates, spread new theories and ideas, but also suffered the consequences of political events that marked those years and impacted on his life and activities.

This thesis presents accurate analyses of the spin-orbit angle for many remarkable transiting exoplanetary systems, including the first measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect for a multiple transiting system.

The author presents the observational methods needed to probe the spin-orbit angle, the relation between the stellar spin axis and planetary orbital axis. Measurements of the spin-orbit angle provide us a unique and valuable opportunity to understand the origin of close-in giant exoplanets, called "hot Jupiters."

The first method introduced involves observations of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect (RM effect). The author points out the issues with the previous theoretical modeling of the RM effect and derives a new and improved theory. Applications of the new theory to observational data are also presented for a number of remarkable systems, and the author shows that the new theory minimizes the systematic errors by applying it to the observational data.

The author also describes another method for constraining the spin-orbit angle: by combining the measurements of stellar flux variations due to dark spots on the stellar surface, with the projected stellar rotational velocity measured via spectroscopy, the spin-orbit angles "along the line-of-sight" are constrained for the transiting exoplanetary systems reported by the Kepler space telescope."

The development of the orbits theory lags behind the development of satellite technology. This book provides, for the first time in the history of human satellite development, the complete third order solution of the orbits under all possible disturbances. It describes the theory of satellite orbits, derives the complete solutions of the orbital disturbances, describes the algorithms of orbits determination based on the theory, describes the applications of the theory to the phenomenon of the satellite formation physically. The subjects include: Orbits Motion Equations, Disturbance theory, Solutions of the differential Equations, Algorithms of Orbits determinations, Applications of the theory to the satellite formation.

This book presents the proceedings of the 2nd Karl Schwarzschild Meeting on Gravitational Physics, focused on the general theme of black holes, gravity and information.Specialists in the field of black hole physics and rising young researchers present the latest findings on the broad topic of black holes, gravity, and information, highlighting its applications to astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, and strongly correlated systems.

This book, which is a reworked and updated version of Steven Bloemen's original PhD thesis, reports on several high-precision studies of compact variable stars. Its strength lies in the large variety of observational, theoretical and instrumentation techniques that are presented and used and paves the way towards new and detailed asteroseismic applications of single and binary subdwarf stars. Close binary stars are studied using high cadence spectroscopic datasets collected with state of the art electron multiplying CCDs and analysed using Doppler tomography visualization techniques. The work touches upon instrumentation, presenting the calibration of a new fast, multi-colour camera installed at the Mercator Telescope on La Palma. The thesis also includes theoretical work on the computation of the temperature range in which stellar oscillations can be driven in subdwarf B-stars. Finally, the highlight of the thesis is the measurement of velocities of stars using only photometric data from NASA's Kepler satellite. Doppler beaming causes stars to appear slightly brighter when they move towards us in their orbits, and this subtle effect can be seen in Kepler's brightness measurements. The thesis presents the first validation of such velocity measurements using independent spectroscopic measurements. Since the detection and validation of this Doppler beaming effect, it has been used in tens of studies to detect and characterize binary star systems, which are key calibrators in stellar astronomy.

The essays in Copernirus and his Successors deal both with the influences on Copernicus, including that of Greek and Arabic thinkers, and with his own life and attitudes. They also examine how he was seen by contemporaries and finally describe his relationship to other scientists, including Galileo, Brahe and Kepler.

In a series of illuminating lectures, Joseph A. Seiss presents a clear picture of astronomical occurrences and inspirations to be found in the Biblical New Testament and Gospels. A superbly insightful Bible commentary, this book contains seventeen lectures, each of which focuses upon a specific astronomical occurrence in the New Testament. Events which draw specific influence from the constellations of the stars are charted, with each star sign identified as important to separate events depicted in the scriptures of the gospels. The nativity of Jesus Christ, wherein the Star of Bethlehem appears to the three wise men, is perhaps the most obvious incident of the astronomical. However, Seiss demonstrates that the stars above are richly significant and play a role in many of the most famous tales of the Bible. For example, when Seiss recounts the story of St. Peter's fishing, he compares the sign of Pisces, which was already widely known in the Biblical era.

The quantity of numbered minor planets is now approaching half a million. Together with this Addendum, the sixth edition of the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, which is the IAU's official reference for the field, now covers more than 19,000 named minor planets. In addition to being of practical value for identification purposes, the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names provides authoritative information about the basis for the rich and colorful variety of ingenious names, from heavenly goddesses to artists, from scientists to Nobel laureates, from historical or political figures to ordinary women and men, from mountains to buildings, as well as a variety of compound terms and curiosities. This Addendum to the 6th edition of the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names adds approximately 2200 entries. It also contains many corrections, revisions and updates to the entries published in earlier editions. This work is an abundant source of information for anyone interested in minor planets and who enjoys reading about the people and things minor planets commemorate.

This book approaches geological, geomorphological and topographical mapping from the point in the workflow at which science-ready datasets are available. Though there have been many individual projects on dynamic maps and online GISs, in which coding and data processing are given precedence over cartographic principles, cartography is more than "just" processing and displaying spatial data. However, there are currently no textbooks on this rapidly changing field, and methods tend to be shared informally. Addressing this gap in the literature, the respective chapters outline many topics pertaining to cartography and mapping such as the role and definition of planetary cartography and (vs?) Geographic Information Science; theoretical background and practical methodologies in geological mapping; science-ready versus public-ready products; a goal/procedure-focused practical manual of the most commonly used software in planetary mapping, which includes generic (ArcGIS and its extensions, JMARS) and specific tools (HiView, Cratertools etc.); extracting topographic information from images; thematic mapping: climate; geophysics; surface modeling; change detection; landing site selection; shared maps; dynamic maps on the web; planetary GIS interfaces; crowdsourcing; crater counting techniques; irregular bodies; geological unit symbology; mapping center activities; and web services. All chapters were prepared by authors who have actually produced geological maps or GISs for NASA / the USGS, DLR, ESA or MIIGAIK. Taken together, they offer an excellent resource for all planetary scientists whose research depends on mapping, and for students of astrogeology.