Related papers: Getting ready for the micro-arcsecond era
This white paper discusses recent progress in the field of evolved stars, primarily highlighting the contributions of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. It discusses the ongoing project, the \emph{Nearby Evolved Stars Survey} (NESS), and…
A new astronomical window into the southern skies has been opened with the high-frequency upgrade to the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), which allows radio-interferometric mapping of sources at wavelengths as short as 3mm. In…
Although far-IR -- mm-wave astronomy has now been developing for several decades, access to this portion of the spectrum remains difficult and limited. Relative to their optical-wavelength counterparts, the submillimeter observatories are…
Cosmography represents an important branch of cosmology which aims to describe the universe without the need of postulating \emph{a priori} any particular cosmological model. All quantities of interest are expanded as a Taylor series around…
Cosmology now has a standard model - a remarkably simple description of the universe, its contents and its history. A symposium held last September in Cambridge, UK, gave this model a 'health check' and discussed fascinating questions that…
The mood at this conference is summarized in David Hughes' comment, ``this decade will be amazing.'' We've just had a pretty good ten years of advances in cosmology and extragalactic astronomy; why should we expect a repeat, another decade…
I summarize the excitement of my role primarily in the early years of X-ray Astronomy. As a "second-generation" X-ray astronomer, I was privileged to participate in the enormous advance of the field, both technically and astrophysically,…
Asteroseismology has the capability of delivering stellar properties which would otherwise be inaccessible, such as radii, masses and thus ages of stars. When coupling this information with classical determinations of stellar parameters,…
The next decade will be an exciting period for solar astrophysics, as new ground- and space-based instrumentation will provide unprecedented observations of the solar atmosphere and heliosphere. The synergy between modeling effort and…
Scientific research is a continuous process, and the speed of future progress can be estimated by the pace of finding explanations for previous research questions. In this observers based view of stellar pulsation and asteroseismology, we…
The Hipparcos Intermediate Astrometric Data have been used lately to estimate the inclination of the orbital plane of candidate extrasolar planets. Whereas most of these investigations derive almost face-on orbits, we show that the…
The advent of large data-set in cosmology has meant that in the past 10 or 20 years our knowledge and understanding of the Universe has changed not only quantitatively but also, and most importantly, qualitatively. Cosmologists rely on data…
The field of gamma-ray astronomy has experienced impressive progress over the last decade. Thanks to the advent of a new generation of imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, VERITAS) and thanks to the launch of the Fermi-LAT…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
This is a review article for The Review of Particle Physics 2026 (aka the Particle Data Book), appearing as Chapter 25. It forms a compact review of knowledge of the cosmological parameters near the end of 2025. Topics included are…
Astronomy is one of the most data-intensive of the sciences. Data technology is accelerating the quality and effectiveness of its research, and the rate of astronomical discovery is higher than ever. As a result, many view astronomy as…
Next-generation radio surveys are about to transform radio astronomy by discovering and studying tens of millions of previously unknown radio sources. These surveys will provide new insights to understand the evolution of galaxies,…
Background. Relative astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with a 1m class space telescope has been repeatedly proposed as a tool for exo-planet detection and characterization, as well as for several topics at the forefront of…
Gender equity is one of the biggest issues facing the field of astrophysics, and there is broad interest in addressing gender disparities within astronomy. Many studies of these topics have been performed by professional astronomers who are…