Milky Way

We introduce a differential equation for star formation in galaxies that incorporates negative feedback with a delay. When the feedback is instantaneous, solutions approach a self-limiting equilibrium state. When there is a delay, even though the feedback is negative, the solutions can exhibit cyclic and episodic solutions. We find that periodic or episodic star formation only occurs when two conditions

Results. For signals near the detection threshold, our low-latency algorithms often localized simulated GW burst signals to tens of square degrees, while neutron star/neutron star inspirals and neutron star/black hole inspirals were localized to a few hundred square degrees. Localization precision improves for moderately stronger signals. The correct sky location of signals well above threshold and originating from nearby galaxies may be observed with ~50% or better probability with a few pointings of wide-field telescopes.

The world-wide problem of increasing light pollution is assessed through the development of global maps of the distribution of zenith sky brightness with a resolution of approximately 1 km. These maps are produced using satellite imagery which provides photometrically calibrated data over the surface of the Earth at night, combined with a model of light scattering in the atmosphere to calculate the sky brightness from a given location. High resolution upward flux data have been obtained from the Operational Linescan System carried by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite, an oscillating scan radiometer with low-light visible and thermal infrared imaging capabilities. Light propagation in the atmosphere was computed at sea level based on the modeling technique introduced by Garstang which account for Earth curvature, double scattering and extinction. The Atlas reveals that light pollution of the night sky is not confined, as commonly believed, to developed countries,...

We model the abundance gradients in the disk of the Milky Way for several chemical elements (O, Mg, Si, S, Ca, Sc, Ti, Co, V, Fe, Ni, Zn, Cu, Mn, Cr, Ba, La and Eu), and compare our results with the most recent and homogeneous observational data. We adopt a chemical evolution model able to well reproduce the main properties of the solar vicinity. We compute, for the first time, the abundance gradients for all the above mentioned elements in the galactocentric distance range 4 - 22 kpc. The comparison with the observed data on Cepheids in the galactocentric distance range 5-17 kpc gives a very good agreement for many of the studied elements. In addition, we fit very well the data for the evolution of Lanthanum in the solar vicinity for which we present results here for the first time. We explore, also for the first time, the behaviour of the abundance gradients at large galactocentric distances by comparing our results with data relative to distant open clusters and red giants and select the best chemical evolution model model on the basis of that. We find a very good fit to the observed abundance gradients, as traced by Cepheids, for most of the elements, thus confirming the validity of the inside-out scenario for the formation of the Milky Way disk as well as the adopted nucleosynthesis prescriptions.

Rising from the Big Bend is what might be the best big idea in the whole state of Texas. Yep, it’s that big!

Bigger than the rocket launches of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bigger than the football coliseums for the Cowboys, Longhorns, and Aggies. Bigger than any tech dream launched by the hipsters at Apple, Google, or Tesla in Austin. Bigger than the towering 10,000 Year Clock being inserted into a 300-foot deep cave in the Sierra Diablo Mountains near Van Horn. Believe it or not, there is something wondrous and profound happening in the Big Bend, far grander than anything happening in our big cities or on our electronic screens.

Imagine a huge swath of the modern world better integrated into the natural world here on Earth and the cosmos above—an area in which the bright skyglow of our cities is tempered in favor of the radiant starglow of the cosmos. In that difference between skyglow and starglow lies hope for a better tomorrow. That’s why we need to turn our gaze away from our screens, at least for a while, and experience our true place in the universe. We can find it in the Big Bend, site of this profound and beautiful project.

It’s called the Greater Big Bend International Dark Sky Reserve. You’ve probably never heard of it. But, I find this to be an incredibly hopeful project, not only for Texans, but for Americans and the rest of humanity Relax, this is not a political essay. It’s a story about hope for a deeper and richer understanding of our place on Earth and in the universe.

From ancient times all over the world people observed the shape and position the Milky Way in the course of the night, of the year and maybe of longer periods. They often used the gleaming stream to orientate themselves in space and time. The alternating positions of the Milky Way related to the horizon, the celestial equator, the Zenith and the celestial poles helped them to organize their biological, psychical, social and religious life. The Milky Way clock integrated man into the cosmos, being a part of archaic reference systems.

Three questions arise: What did the ancient people think about the shape and substance of the Milky Way? What are the main positions of the Milky Way, related to the horizon, the celestial equator, the Zodiac, the Zenith and the celestial poles? Were there any positions in the past, which could have an outstanding meaning to ancient cultures?

In the first part of this paper a cross-cultural overview about the answers to the first two questions, as found in different cultures is presented. In the second section the attention is drawn to an impressive position of the Milky Way, where the northern sky pole was situated at the Palaeolithic epoch (20500-12000 BC).

The study is based on an interdisciplinary approach, using data of ethnology, mythology, archaeology, and of the scientific study of religion. The timeline of the second section is established by the help of astronomical computations made with Skyglobe 3.6. (KlassM Software) and controlled for proper motions of the stars by Starry Night Pro. 3.11c-EW (Sienna Software).

This paper compares the Milky Way in Aratus (Ph. 469–79) and Manilius (1.684–804), focusing on the role of the sublime in both texts. In Aratus, to gaze at the Milky Way is a sublime experience that constitutes an image for reading the Phaenomena.  In addition, the sublimity of the Milky Way transports us to a time when the heavens were not fully understood. To wonder at the Milky Way is a transcendent, spiritual experience that pushes us to study the heavens. Manilius responds to Aratus in ways that have gone unnoticed. The Milky Way fills viewers with sublime wonder and physically compels contemplation of the stars and the divine. Because of its physical power, however, the Milky Way symbolizes the principles and mechanisms of astrology and the sublimity of the astrological poet. Manilius also reminds the reader of an earlier era in the history of stargazing, but this experience plunges us into sublime terror, offering a darker view of the past than Aratus. Manilius’ narrative contains an additional self-referential image. According to some, Phaethon’s fiery chariot ride produced the Milky Way. For Manilius, though, Phaethon is an exuberant stargazer whose daring adventure symbolizes an approach to the heavens that is properly and polemically sublime.

In this paper it is shown how three ancient earthworks in Ohio incorporate alignments to the Milky Way in their design. These earthworks are: Serpent Mound, the Great Hopewell Road at Newark, and Mound City. It is suggested that the Milky Way alignments at these sites reference aspects of an ancient narrative concerning the Milky Way Path of Souls. The Milky Way Path of Souls was the path that souls of the deceased had to travel in order to reach the Land of the Dead. The narrative was (and is) widely known across North America. The findings in this paper represent updated and in some cases, revised findings using the computer simulation program, Stellarium.

This began as a Supplementary Table to Harrod (2022), Portable Art Sculptures from the Anzick Clovis Cache, Wilsall, Montana. I did it to provide a Siberian/East Asian and North American comparative mythology context to identify Anzick Clovis cache (13,000 years ago) portable art, and identify possible depictions of Siberian/East Asian and North American Afterlife Beliefs, Mortuary Rituals and Psychopomp Motifs, especially involving Milky Way, Path of Souls of Deceased, Bird, Dog, Coyote or Wolf, and Reincarnation. Especially since this Version 2 is 177 pages long, I decided best to upload this separately from my Anzick article, to stand independently, pertaining to global comparative mythology on these beliefs and their symbolism.

This paper will conduct a detail analyze on Freemasonry's symbolism codified to The Great Seal of the United States obverse and reverse sides, The Apotheosis of George Washington, The Centennial Great Seal of 1882, The Capitol Building and the mapping out of Washington DC.

Here I analyze Freemasonry ongoing enterprise of codifying esoteric symbols into the streets and monuments of Washington DC.  Most of the symbols I discuss have never been videoed or written about by previous authors or film makers.

What I wish to show in this presentation is how certain Hopewell sites may have been connected to each other through religion and mythology. The relevance of this to Chaco and the discussion at hand is not in the listing of specific attributes held in common; but rather, in the recognition of large-scale site entanglements and connections found in both cultures .

Cahokia was a major Native American city on the east side of the Mississippi River, across from the modern-day city of St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia flourished from c.1050 AD to c.1250. In this paper archaeoastronomic and ethnohistoric data along with computer simulations are used to explore the idea that the Cahokia site axis and the Rattlesnake Causeway were intentionally aligned to the Milky Way. It is proposed that this alignment accounts for the peculiar 5° offset of the site from the cardinal directions. Following Sarah Baires, it is suggested that Rattlesnake Causeway was a terrestrial metaphor for the Milky Way Path of Souls used by the deceased to cross to the Land of the Dead. Rattlesnake Mound at the end of the Causeway is suggested as a portal to the Path of Souls. According to ethnohistoric accounts, the Land of the Dead was guarded by a Great Serpent-suggested here as visible in the night sky as either the constellation Serpens or that of Scorpius.

The Angel Mounds site was a large, fortified Mississippian village located in southwestern Indiana. The site flourished from circa AD 1100 to AD 1450 and represents one of the largest recorded Mississippian settlements in the Ohio River Valley. In this article, we use astronomic data, lidar imagery, ethnohistoric data, and computer planetarium simulations to identify solar, stellar, and lunar alignments at the site. Of special interest are new findings showing how mound axes are oriented to the Milky Way on the night of the summer solstice. In traditional Eastern Woodlands belief, the Milky Way was the path that souls of the dead traveled on their journey to the Land of the Dead.

IT'S HERE NOW!!! 
IT’S GOING TO BE REAL STRANGE.  PEOPLE MUST NOT BE AFRAID, IN FACT, ALL PEOPLE NEED TO BE REAL HAPPY ABOUT THIS EVENT AND BE READY TO GET OUTSIDE. GROUNDED.  THIS IS MEANT TO CLEAN ALL OF THE POLLUTION AND PROBABLY EVEN THE RADIATION FROM THE PLANET.

SOLID EVIDENCE OF THE INCOMING WAVE

Kolterman Mound site, a premier petroform and archeoastronomy site overlooking the vast Horicon Marsh, is located 20 miles (32 km) south and east of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (USA). Viewing of the long anticipated 2006 lunar maximum moonset event from this site enabled the author to connect the singular bear effigy mound at Kolterman with other (lunar) aligned bear effigy mounds in the area. Looking farther afield in Ohio by extension of known bear cult imagery and lunar maximum alignments, combined bear and moon symbolism was also established at the prominent Newark giant earthworks site with links to another at High Banks, the two sites connected at one time by the “Hopewell Road”. Physical expressions on the cultural landscape, the sites are likely related to ancient bear cult shamanistic traditions and inherent cosmologies, and although modified by time and distance, appear to exhibit shared beliefs and function of design.
Keywords: moon, bear, effigy, mound, Milky Way

Situated in the heart of the Vilcabamba cordillera in Peru, some 150 km northwest of Cuzco, the ancient Inca state
capital, Choqek’iraw or Choquequirao (“the golden cradle” in Quechua), is one of the most beautiful achievements of
Inca architecture, and one of the very few pre-Hispanic sites displaying large wall mosaics, the only one known from
Inca times. This article will attempt to demonstrate that the figures represented on the walls convey cosmological significance
and are laid out following textile principles. After describing the site and its geo-cultural setting, the mosaics’ main
characteristics will be examined in detail, in an attempt to grasp their meaning. Finally, the author suggests that some of
the scenes depicted could have been inspired by pre-Columbian myths and could be linked to astronomical concepts.

“Gravitons kill Aliens”
Adrian Ferent

“I am the first who explained the lack of extraterrestrial civilizations”
Adrian Ferent

“Gravitons emitted by Black Holes kill Aliens”
Adrian Ferent

I calculated: the graviton’s energy emitted by black holes is higher than: 
E = 4.14559 × 10^5 GeV

“Gravitational radiation is gravitons”
Adrian Ferent

“I am the first who explained Gravitational Radiation”
Adrian Ferent
“Scientists are looking for extraterrestrial civilizations, where is a high density of stars and planets, around Black Holes, like in the center of our galaxy.
It is the same thing like looking for forests in the Sahara desert because is big”
Adrian Ferent

“Looking at stars I realized how powerful is the Mind, to know where the extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy are”
Adrian Ferent

Where to look for extraterrestrial civilizations?
“Extraterrestrial civilizations are on planets moving around stars far away from Black Holes”
Adrian Ferent

“Gravitational Radiation is the most dangerous because it travels the farthest and is the most penetrating”
Adrian Ferent

The number of civilizations in our galaxy, Drake equation.
Drake equation is wrong because Drake concluded that  N ≈ L, this means N is between 1000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars.
This means the majority of stars do not have at least a planet with intelligent life.
The Milky Way is home to more than 100 million black holes.

“Black holes are Ferent matter”
Adrian Ferent

“There are not extraterrestrial civilizations in the center of our galaxy”
Adrian Ferent

“Around each Black hole there is a volume where can not exist civilizations, because of deadly gravitons emitted by Black hole”
Adrian Ferent

We have to look for extraterrestrial civilizations, only in the volume Vl, not in the entire Milky Way galaxy, like Drake equation and other equations do or how Asimov calculated.
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
There are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are similar to the Sun and no evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.

“Why there is no evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations? Because gravitons emitted by black holes kill Aliens”
Adrian Ferent

“I found the answer to this question: why the Universe is so quiet and why we do not see UFOs?

There are only a small number of extraterrestrial civilizations in a galaxy; there are not extraterrestrial civilizations in the center of the galaxy where is the highest density of stars, there are not extraterrestrial civilizations around Black Holes”
Adrian Ferent

We consider the Universe deep inside the cell of uniformity. At these scales, the Universe is filled with inhomogeneously distributed discrete structures (galaxies, groups and clusters of galaxies), which perturb the background Friedmann model. Here, the mechanical approach (Eingorn & Zhuk, 2012) is the most appropriate to describe the dynamics of the inhomogeneities which is defined, on the one hand, by gravitational potentials of inhomogeneities and, on the other hand, by the cosmological expansion of the Universe. In this paper, we present additional arguments in favor of this approach. First, we estimate the size of the cell of uniformity. With the help of the standard methods of statistical physics and for the galaxies of the type of the Milky Way and Andromeda, we get that it is of the order of 190 Mpc which is rather close to observations. Then, we show that the nonrelativistic approximation (with respect to the peculiar velocities) is valid for $z \lesssim 10$, i.e. approximately for 13 billion years from the present moment. We consider scalar perturbations and, within the $\Lambda$CDM model, justify the main equations. Moreover, we demonstrate that radiation can be naturally incorporated into our scheme. This emphasizes the viability of our approach. This approach gives a possibility to analyze different cosmological models and compare them with the observable Universe. For example, we indicate some problematic aspects of the spatially flat models. Such models require a rather specific distribution of the inhomogeneities to get a finite potential at any points outside gravitating masses. We also criticize the application of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter solution to the description of the motion of test bodies on the cosmological background.

Choqek’iraw, in the heart of theVilcabamba
cordillera, in Peru, some 150 km from the former Inca State capital Cuzco, is one of the
very few Pre-Hispanic sites displaying large wall mosaics, and the only known one from
Inca times. This paper will attempt to demonstrate that the figures represented on the
walls convey cosmological significance and are laid out following textile principles.
We will first describe the site and its geo-cultural setting. Then, the mosaics’ main
characteristics will be examined in detail, in attempt to grasp their meaning. We
conclude this paper by suggesting that some of the scenes depicted might have been
inspired by pre-Columbian myths and might be linked to astronomical concepts.

In the archaeological record of Malayo-Polynesian Philippines, the absence of monumental structures in the basic architectural forms of either the tower or earth/mountain, and the presence of boat-shaped burial markers laid out low to the ground in stones or coral slabs, are two sides of the same collective cosmological coin. In the Philippines archipelago, the sense of the cosmic cannot be materialized in monumental structures that either defy the earth or that identify with the cosmic. Rather, the sense of the cosmic is imposed by and is immanent in the weather and seismic events. The fickle and frequently powerful and destructive natural environment defines the cosmological, which can only be highlighted or pointed out, not mastered or made a home of. Thus the boat-shaped markers appear to flow and disappear into the farther landscape. The Annales concept of the longue duree helps clarify these architectural peculiarities of the various Malayo-Polynesian peoples of the Philippines archipelago, who shared in the region-wide Austronesian ethnic and linguistic heritage, but who more peculiarly shared in their own archipelago’s distinctive combination of weather and seismic activity. In the instances of the boat markers, these peculiarities concretely manifest the coming together of the purpose and concern of monumental architecture with the archipelago’s collective world view.

We derive structural parameters for ~2000 globular clusters in the giant Virgo elliptical M87 using extremely deep Hubble Space Telescope images in F606W (V) and F814W (I) taken with the ACS/WFC. The cluster scale sizes (half-light radii r_h) and ellipticities are determined from PSF-convolved King-model profile fitting. We find that the r_h distribution closely resembles the inner Milky Way clusters, peaking at r_h~2.5 pc and with virtually no clusters more compact than r_h ~ 1 pc. The metal-poor clusters have on average an r_h 24% larger than the metal-rich ones. The cluster scale size shows a gradual and noticeable increase with galactocentric distance. Clusters are very slightly larger in the bluer waveband V a possible hint that we may be beginning to see the effects of mass segregation within the clusters. We also derived a color magnitude diagram for the M87 globular cluster system which show a striking bimodal distribution.

We used a combination of public RR Lyrae star catalogs and a Bayesian methodology to derive robust structural parameters of the inner Halo (<25 kpc) and Thick Disc of the Milky Way. RR Lyrae stars are an unequivocal tracer of old metal-poor populations, for which accurate distances and extinctions can be individually estimated and so, are a reliable independent means of tracing the population of the old high-[α/Fe] disc usually associated to the Thick Disc. In particular, the chosen RR Lyrae sample spans regions at low galactic latitude toward the anti-center direction, allowing to probe the outermost parts of the disc. Our results favour a Thick Disc with short scale height and short scale length, h_z=0.65_-0.05^+0.09 kpc, h_R=2.1_-0.25^+0.82 kpc, for a model in which the inner Halo has a constant flattening of q=0.90_-0.03^+0.05 and a power law index of n=-2.78_-0.05^+0.05. Similar short scales for the Thick Disc are also found when considering an inner Halo with flattening dep...