Related papers: Astrophysics in 2006
Nuclear Astrophysics is a field at the intersection of nuclear physics and astrophysics, which seeks to understand the nuclear engines of astronomical objects and the origin of the chemical elements. This white paper summarizes progress and…
A fundamental question that can be answered in the next decade is: WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF THE HIGHEST ENERGY COSMIC PARTICLES? The discovery of the sources of the highest energy cosmic rays will reveal the workings of the most energetic…
Neutrinos are produced by a variety of sources that comprise our Sun, explosive environments such as core-collapse supernovae, the Earth and the Early Universe. The precise origin of the recently discovered ultra-high energy neutrinos is to…
The current search for habitable planets has focused on Earth-like conditions of mass, volatile content and orbit. However, rocky planets following eccentric orbits, and drier than the Earth, may be a more common phenomenon in the Universe.…
A brief survey is presented of new science that will emerge during the decades ahead from direct detection of gravitational radiation. Interferometers on earth and in space will probe the universe in an entirely new way by directly sensing…
In studies of the oldest solar system bodies - comets and asteroids - it is their fragments - meteoroids - that provide the most accessible planetary material for detailed laboratory analysis in the form of dust particles or meteorites.…
The last decade has shown us that the observational properties of neutron stars are remarkably diverse. From magnetars to rotating radio transients, from radio pulsars to `isolated neutron stars,' from central compact objects to millisecond…
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
This is a survey of the current experimental information on some of the interesting issues in neutrino physics: neutrino species, neutrino masses, neutrino magnetic moments, solar neutrinos, and the atmospheric neutrino anomaly.
Over the last third of the century, a few tens of events, detected by ground-based cosmic ray detectors, have opened a new window in the field of high-energy astrophysics. These events have macroscopic energies, unobserved sources, an…
Planetary nebulae are formed by the matter ejected by low-to-intermediate mass stars (~0.8-8 times the mass of the Sun) towards the end of their lives. As hydrogen and then helium fuel sources run out, stars expand. During these giant…
A pedagogical overview of strange quark matter and strange stars is presented. After a historical notation of the research and an introduction to quark matter, a major part is devoted to the physics and astrophysics of strange stars, with…
Several issues related to the lensing of ultra-high energy cosmic rays by the Galactic magnetic field are discussed.
The burgeoning field of multi-messenger astronomy is poised to revolutionize our understanding of the most enigmatic astrophysical phenomena in the Universe. At the same time, it has opened a new window of opportunity to probe various…
About 400 years have passed since the great discoveries by Galilei, Kepler and Newton, but astronomy still remains an important source of discoveries in physics. They start with puzzles, with phenomena difficult to explain, and which in…
The physics of the supernova may provide a clue of the cosmological dark matter. In the absence of new physics, the supernova calculations do not explain the observed velocities of pulsars. However, if there exists a singlet fermion with…
The Astrophysics of microquasars - galactic miniatures of the far distant quasars - has become one of the most active fields of modern Astronomy in recent years. Here I review the astronomical methods used for the investigation of these…
Charged particles at the crust of compact stars may be ejected and accelerated by the electric field generated due to the rotation of the magnetized star. For neutron or hybrid stars, the negatively charged particles are usually electrons,…
Neutron stars are rich laboratories of multiple branches of modern physics. These include gravitational physics, nuclear and particle physics, (quantum) electrodynamics, and plasma astrophysics. In this chapter, we present the pioneering…
The physics of the mysterious and stealthy neutrino is at the heart of many phenomena in the cosmos. These particles interact with matter and with each other through the aptly named weak interaction. At typical astrophysical energies the…