Related papers: Photometric Calibrations for 21st Century Science
The development of sensitive large format imaging arrays for the infrared promises to provide revolutionary capabilities for space astronomy. For example, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on SIRTF will use four 256 x 256 arrays to provide…
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…
Stellar mass plays a central role in our understanding of star formation and aging. Stellar astronomy is largely based on two maps, both dependent on mass, either indirectly or directly: the Hertzprung-Russell Diagram (HRD) and the…
Optimal error estimation is key to achieve accurate photometry and astrometry. Stellar fluxes and positions in high angular resolution images are typically measured with PSF fitting routines, such as StarFinder. However, the formal…
We present a precise photometric calibration of the first 1.5 years of science imaging from the Pan-STARRS1 survey (PS1), an ongoing optical survey of the entire sky north of declination -30 degrees in five bands. Building on the techniques…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…
The science goals for ground-based large-area surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, require calibration of broadband photometry that is stable in time and uniform over the sky to…
The potential of cosmic shear to probe cosmology is well recognized and future optical wide field surveys are currently being designed to optimize the return of cosmic shear science. High precision cosmic shear analysis requires high…
Astrophotonics is a burgeoning field that lies at the interface of photonics and modern astronomical instrumentation. Here we provide a pedagogical review of basic photonic functions that enable modern instruments, and give an overview of…
The question "How did we get here and what will the future bring?" captures the human imagination and the attention of the National Academy of Science's Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Commitee (AASC). Fulfillment of this "fundamental…
As the universe expands astronomical observables such as brightness and angular size on the sky change in ways that differ from our simple Cartesian expectation. We show how observed quantities depend on the expansion of space and…
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…
Astronomical precision spectroscopy underpins searches for life beyond Earth, direct observation of the expanding Universe and constraining the potential variability of physical constants across cosmological scales. Laser frequency combs…
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…
A number of large spectroscopic surveys of stars in the Milky Way are under way or are being planned. In this context it is important to discuss the extent to which elemental abundances can be used as discriminators between different (known…
Our knowledge of the Universe remains discovery-led: in the absence of adequate physics-based theory, interpretation of new results requires a scientific methodology. Commonly, scientific progress in astrophysics is motivated by the…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
Measurements of the luminosity of type Ia supernovae vs. redshift provided the original evidence for the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the existence of dark energy. Despite substantial improvements in survey methodology,…
Accurate relative spectrophotometry is critical for many science applications. Small wavelength scale residuals in the flux calibration can significantly impact the measurements of weak emission and absorption features in the spectra. Using…