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Modern astrophysics is undergoing a revolution. As detector technology has advanced, and astronomers have been able to study the sky with finer temporal detail, a rich diversity of sources which vary on timescales from years down to a few…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
The detection and characterisation of extra-solar planets is a major theme driving modern astronomy, with the vast majority of such measurements being achieved by Doppler radial-velocity and transit observations. Another technique -- direct…
All sciences, including astronomy, are now entering the era of information abundance. The exponentially increasing volume and complexity of modern data sets promises to transform the scientific practice, but also poses a number of common…
The study of stellar populations is a discipline that is highly dependent on both imaging and spectroscopy. I discuss techniques in different regimes of resolving power: broadband imaging (R~4), intermediate band imaging (R~16, 64),…
Centuries of effort to improve imaging has focused on perfecting and combining lenses to obtain better optical performance and new functionalities. The arrival of nanotechnology has brought to this effort engineered surfaces called…
Long baseline optical interferometry and aperture synthesis using ground-based telescopes can enable unprecedented angular resolution astronomy in the optical domain. However, atmospheric turbulence leads to large, dynamic phase errors…
Nonlinear nanophotonics is a rapidly developing field with many useful applications for a design of nonlinear nanoantennas, light sources, nanolasers, sensors, and ultrafast miniature metadevices. A tight confinement of the local…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
Astrometry is one of the oldest branches of astronomy which measures the position, the proper motion and parallax of celestial objects. Following the Hipparcos and Gaia missions that have measured several billions of them using global…
High-contrast observations in optical and infrared astronomy are defined as any observation requiring a technique to reveal a celestial object of interest that is in such close angular proximity to another source brighter by a factor of at…
Optical designs for astronomy involve implementation of active optics and adaptive optics from X-ray to the infrared. Developments and results of active optics methods for telescopes, spectrographs and coronagraph planet finders are…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
Astronomy has a rich tradition of using color photography and imaging, for visualization in research as well as for sharing scientific discoveries in formal and informal education settings (i.e., for "public outreach.") In the modern era,…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
Far-infrared astronomy has advanced rapidly since its inception in the late 1950's, driven by a maturing technology base and an expanding community of researchers. This advancement has shown that observations at far-infrared wavelengths are…
Improved quantum sensing of photons from astronomical objects could provide high resolution observations in the optical benefiting numerous fields, including general relativity, dark matter studies, and cosmology. It has been recently…
The primary goal of Galactic archaeology is to learn about the origin of the Milky Way from the detailed chemistry and kinematics of millions of stars. Wide-field multi-fibre spectrographs are increasingly used to obtain spectral…
Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre variations induced by rotating surface…