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Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…
The understanding and modeling of the structure and evolution of stars is based on statistical physics as well as on hydrodynamics. Today, a precise identification and proper description of the physical processes at work in stellar…
The 2020s are poised to continue the past two decades of significant advances based on observations of dwarf galaxies in the nearby universe. Upcoming wide-field photometric surveys will probe substantially deeper than previous data sets,…
How to analyse Terabytes of photometric data, and extract knowledge on variable stars? How to detect variable phenomena? How to combine different photometric bands? Which algorithm to search for periods? How to characterize and classify the…
One of the major goals of observational cosmology is to acquire empirical data that has the diagnostic power to develop the theoretical modelling of the high-redshift universe, ultimately leading to an accurate understanding of the…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
Cosmic voids, the large underdense regions of our Universe, have emerged over the past decade as powerful cosmological laboratories: their simple dynamics, sensitivity to local gravitational effects and cosmic expansion, and ability to span…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
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…
Modern X-ray observatories yield unique insight into the astrophysical time domain. Each X-ray photon can be assigned an arrival time, an energy and a sky position, yielding sensitive, energy-dependent light curves and enabling…
Future space and ground-based survey programmes will produce an impressive amount of photometric data. The GAIA space mission will map the complete sky down to mag V=20 and produce time series for about 1 billion stars. Survey instruments…
Our knowledge of the Galaxy is being revolutionised by a series of photometric, spectroscopic and astrometric surveys. Already an enormous body of data is available from completed surveys, and data of ever increasing quality and richness…
Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
Only astronomical observations can effectively probe in space-time the variabil ity of the physical dimensionless constants such as the fine structure constant and proton-to-electron mass ratio, \mu, which are related to fund amental forces…
Fundamental changes are taking place in the way we do astronomy. In twenty years time, it is likely that most astronomers will never go near a cutting-edge telescope, which will be much more efficiently operated in service mode. They will…
Combined studies of variable stars and stellar clusters open great horizons, and they allow us to improve our understanding of stellar cluster formation and stellar evolution. In that prospect, the Gaia mission will provide astrometric,…
Many decades ago a search for variable stars was one of the main areas of astrophysical research. Such searches, conducted with CCD detectors rather than with photographic plates, became a by-product of several projects seeking…