Related papers: New Discoveries in Galaxies across Cosmic Time thr…
In spite of great progress over the last $\sim 10$ years, especially thanks to HST, a number of exciting open problem still puzzle astronomers working on globular clusters in our own and other galaxies. These problems range from determining…
Looking ahead to the next decade and imagining the landscape of astronomy in 2020, it is clear that astronomical surveys, large and small, plus extensive follow-up projects, will be a great engine of progress in our profession. Surveys have…
While astrophysical and cosmological probes provide a remarkably precise and consistent picture of the quantity and general properties of dark matter, its fundamental nature remains one of the most significant open questions in physics.…
Astroparticle physics is undergoing a profound transformation, due to a series of extraordinary new results, such as the discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos with IceCube, the direct detection of gravitational waves with LIGO and…
The observational evidence for the recent acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete (or possibly incorrect) and that new physics is out there, waiting to be…
Advancements in our understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres, from massive gas giants down to rocky worlds, depend on the constructive challenges between observations and models. We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in…
This brief overview stresses the importance of laboratory data and theory in analyzing astronomical observations and understanding the physical and chemical processes that drive the astrophysical phenomena in our Universe. This includes…
Over the past decade, research in resolved stellar populations has made great strides in exploring the nature of dark matter, in unraveling the star formation, chemical enrichment, and dynamical histories of the Milky Way and nearby…
Laboratory studies for planetary science and astrobiology aimat advancing our understanding of the Solar System through the promotion of theoretical and experimental research into the underlying processes that shape it. Laboratory studies…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
The recent observational evidence for the acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete - if not incorrect - and that new physics is out there, waiting to be discovered.…
We write in response to the call from the 2020 Decadal Survey to submit white papers illustrating the most pressing scientific questions in astrophysics for the coming decade. We propose exploration as the central question for the Decadal…
The past decade began with the first light of ALMA and will end at the start of the new era of hyperdimensional astrophysics. Our community-wide movement toward highly multiwavelength and multidimensional datasets has enabled immense…
The next generation of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors will observe coalescences of black holes and neutron stars throughout the cosmos, thousands of them with exceptional fidelity. The Science Book is the result of a 3-year…
The Galactic Center of the Milky Way, thanks to its proximity, allows to perform astronomical observations that investigate physical phenomena at the edge of astrophysics and fundamental physics. As such, it offers a unique laboratory to…
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…
Dwarf galaxies make ideal laboratories to test galaxy evolution paradigms and cosmological models. Detailed studies of dwarfs across the spectrum allow us to gauge the efficacy of astrophysical processes at play in the lowest mass halos…
The next decade affords tremendous opportunity to achieve the goals of Galactic archaeology. That is, to reconstruct the evolutionary narrative of the Milky Way, based on the empirical data that describes its current morphological,…
At the turn of the decade we arguably move from the era of precision cosmology to the era of galaxy formation. One approach to this problem will be via the construction of comprehensive galaxy samples. In this review I take the opportunity…