Related papers: A Modest Proposal for the Astronomical Community
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NICMOS instrument has been used from 1997 to 2008 to perform coronagraphic observations of about 400 targets. Most of them were part of surveys looking for substellar companions or resolved circumstellar…
Temporal text, i.e., time-stamped text data are found abundantly in a variety of data sources like newspapers, blogs and social media posts. While today's data management systems provide facilities for searching full-text data, they do not…
ALMA will become fully operational in a few years and open a new window on primordial galaxies. The mm and submm domain is privileged, since the peak of dust emission between 60 and 100 microns is redshifted there for z= 5-10, and the…
NASA regards data handling and archiving as an integral part of space missions, and has a strong track record of serving astrophysics data to the public, beginning with the the IRAS satellite in 1983. Archives enable a major science return…
Today's peer review process for scientific articles is unnecessarily opaque and offers few incentives to referees. Likewise, the publishing process is unnecessarily inefficient and its results are only rarely made freely available to the…
LOFAR, the Low-Frequency Array, is a next-generation software-driven radio telescope operating between 30 and 240MHz, currently under construction by ASTRON in the Netherlands. This low frequency radio band is one of the few largely…
We historically trace various non-conventional explanations for the origin of the cosmic microwave background and discuss their merit, while analyzing the dynamics of their rejection, as well as the relevant physical and methodological…
We present a summary of the major contributions to the Special Session on Data Management held at the IAU General Assembly in Prague in 2006. While recent years have seen enormous improvements in access to astronomical data, and the Virtual…
ASTRO-F is the second Japanese space mission for infrared astronomy and is scheduled to be launched into a sun-synchronous polar orbit by the Japanese M-V rocket in February 2004. ASTRO-F has a cooled 67 cm telescope with two focal plane…
Three-dimensional simulations of relativistic jets are a useful tool to understand the evolution of jets and radio galaxies in detail. However, computationally demanding as they are, their use is limited to a relatively small number of…
The Astrodynamical Space Test of Relativity using Optical Devices (ASTROD) is a multi-purpose relativity mission concept. ASTROD's scientific goals are the measurement of relativistic and solar system parameters to unprecedented precision,…
Deep astronomical images are often constructed by digitially stacking many individual sub-exposures. Each sub-exposure is expected to show small differences in the positions of stars and other objects in the field, due to the movement of…
As we prepare for the next planetary mission charged with finding life beyond Earth, the Astrobiology community must continue to improve its understanding of what constitutes a biosignature, through the use of planetary analog samples. The…
Comparing clustering of differently biased tracers of the dark matter distribution offers the opportunity to reduce the cosmic variance error in the measurement of certain cosmological parameters. We develop a formalism that includes bias…
The LOw Frequency ARray - LOFAR - is a new radio interferometer designed with emphasis on flexible digital hardware instead of mechanical solutions. The array elements, so-called stations, are located in the Netherlands and in neighbouring…
Optical polarimetry provides information on the geometry of the emitting region, the magnetic field configuration and the properties of dust in astrophysical sources. Current state-of-the-art instruments typically have a small field of view…
Scientific discovery is mediated by ideas that, after being formulated in hypotheses, can be tested, validated, and quantified before they eventually lead to accepted concepts. Computer-mediated discovery in astrophysics is no exception,…
Future galaxy surveys hope to realize significantly tighter constraints on various cosmological parameters. The higher number densities achieved by these surveys will allow them to probe the smaller scales affected by non-linear clustering.…
The Forschungszentrum Juelich has been hosting the German part of the LOFAR archive since 2013. It is Germany's most extensive radio astronomy archive, currently storing nearly 22 petabytes (PB) of data. Future radio telescopes are expected…
A common problem in the sciences is that a signal of interest is observed only indirectly, through smooth functionals of the signal whose values are then obscured by noise. In such inverse problems, the functionals dampen or entirely…