Related papers: Ground-Based Astrometry 2010-2020
Astronomy, of all the sciences, is possibly the one with the most public appeal across all age groups. This is also evidenced by the existence of a large number of planetaria and amateur astronomy societies, which is unique to the field.…
Gaia is an ambitious ESA space mission which will provide photometric and astrometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a kinematic census of almost one billion stars in our Galaxy. These data will revolutionize our…
The {\Gaia} astrometric mission was approved by the European Space Agency in 2000 and the construction of the spacecraft and payload is on-going for a launch in late 2012. {\Gaia} will continuously scan the entire sky for 5 years, yielding…
Electromagnetic observations of the sky have been the basis for our study of the Universe for millennia, cosmic ray studies are now entering their second century, the first neutrinos from an astrophysical source were identified three…
The morphology and kinematics of the spiral structure of the Milky Way is a long-standing problem in astrophysics. In this review we firstly summarize various methods with different tracers used to solve this puzzle. The astrometry of…
Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the…
Mapping the dark matter distribution across our Galaxy represents a central challenge for the near future as a new generation of space-borne and ground-based astronomical surveys swiftly comes online. Here we present a synopsis of the…
After exactly a century since the formulation of the general theory of relativity, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing is still an extremely powerful method for investigating in astrophysics and cosmology. Indeed, it is adopted to study…
Almost 80 years have passed since Trumpler's analysis of the Galactic open cluster system laid one of the main foundations for understanding the nature and structure of the Milky Way. Since then, the open cluster system has been recognised…
The Ks band differential star count of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) is used to derive the global structure parameters of the smooth components of the Milky Way. To avoid complication introduced by other fine structures and…
We look at what astronomy from the Moon might be like in the visible over the next few decades. The Moon offers the possibility of installing large telescopes or interferometers with instruments larger than those on orbiting telescopes. We…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
The NEAT (Nearby Earth Astrometric Telescope) mission is a proposition submitted to ESA for its 2010 call for M-size mission. The main scientific goal is to detect and characterize planetary systems in an exhaustive way down to 1 Earth mass…
Whether we live in a spatially finite universe, and what its shape and size may be, are among the fundamental long-standing questions in cosmology. These questions of topological nature have become particularly topical, given the wealth of…
Sky survey is one of the most important motivations to improve the astrophysics development, especially when using new photometric bands. We are performing the SAGE (Stellar Abundance and Galactic Evolution) survey with a self-designed SAGE…
We argue that it is essential that the Astro2020 survey of the present state of American astronomy and the recommendations for the next decade address the issue of ensuring preservation of, and making more discoverable and accessible, the…
We will study the formation history of the Milky Way, and the earliest phases of its chemical enrichment, with a sample of more than 1.5 million stars at high galactic latitude. Elemental abundances of up to 20 elements with a precision of…
The Milky Way provides an ideal laboratory to test our understanding of galaxy evolution, owing to our ability to observe our Galaxy over fine scales. However, connecting the Galaxy to the wider galaxy population remains difficult, due to…
Precision astrometry offers a way to probe new physics. By measuring the angular position of light sources at unprecedented precision, astrometry could probe minuscule fluctuations of underlying spacetime. This work explores the possibility…
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…