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Evolved stars dominate galactic spectra, enrich the galactic medium, expand to change their planetary systems, eject winds of a complex nature, produce spectacular nebulae and illuminate them, and transfer material between binary…
The Sun is an active star that can have a direct impact on the Earth, its magnetosphere, and the technological infrastructure on which modern society depends. Among the phenomena that drive "space weather" are fast solar wind streams and…
Interferometric observations of stars in late stages of stellar evolution and the impact of VLTI observations are discussed. Special attention is paid to the spectral information that can be derived from these observations and on the…
An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…
The study of the morphology of galaxies is important in order to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and their sub-components as a function of luminosity, environment, and star-formation and galaxy assembly over cosmic time.…
Astronomical data are typically irregular in time, e.g. the space (HIPPARCOS/TYCHO, KEPLER, GAIA, WISE etc.) and ground-based CCD (NSVS, ASAS, CRTS, SuperWASP etc.) and photographic (Harvard, Sonneberg, Odessa etc.) photometrical surveys.…
Direct determination of fundamental stellar parameters has many profound and wide-ranging impacts throughout astrophysics. These determinations are rooted in high angular resolution observations. In particular, as long-baseline optical…
Cosmology is one of the four science pillars of LSST, which promises to be transformative for our understanding of dark energy and dark matter. The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) has been tasked with deriving constraints on…
Data challenges are emerging as powerful tools with which to answer fundamental astronomical questions. Time-domain astronomy lends itself to data challenges, particularly in the era of classification and anomaly detection. With improved…
During this last decade our knowledge of the evolutionary properties of stars has significantly improved. This result has been achieved thanks to our improved understanding of the physical behavior of stellar matter in the thermal regimes…
Radio wavelengths offer the unique possibility of tracing the total star-formation rate in galaxies, both obscured and unobscured. As such, they may provide the most robust measurement of the star-formation history of the Universe. In this…
The study of stellar structure and evolution is one of the main building blocks of astrophysics, and the Sun has an importance both as the star that is most amenable to detailed study and as the star that has by far the biggest impact on…
Astronomy has a long history of acquiring, systematizing, and interpreting large quantities of data. Starting from the earliest sky atlases through the first major photographic sky surveys of the 20th century, this tradition is continuing…
Progress in astronomy comes from interpreting the signals encoded in the light received from distant objects: the distribution of light over the sky (images), over photon wavelength (spectrum), over polarization angle, and over time…
The feasibility of using data from the NASA STEREO mission for variable star and asteroseismology studies has been examined. A data analysis pipeline has been developed that is able to apply selected algorithms to the entire database of…
The stellar populations of galaxies contain a wealth of detailed information. From the youngest, most massive stars, to almost invisible remnants, the history of star formation is encoded in the stars that make up a galaxy. Extracting some,…
Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of cosmology and has emerged as a key probe for the Dark Universe. Up till now this science has been conducted mainly at optical wavelengths. Current upgraded and future radio facilities will…
Cosmography, as an integral branch of cosmology, strives to characterize the Universe without relying on pre-determined cosmological models. This model-independent approach utilizes Taylor series expansions around the current epoch,…
Facing the advent of the next generation cosmological surveys we present a method to forecast knowledge gain on cosmological models. We propose this as a well defined and general tool to quantify the performance of different experiments in…
Small satellite platforms with high performance avionics are becoming more affordable. So far, with a few exceptions, small satellites have been mainly dedicated to earth observation. However, astronomy is a fascinating field with a history…