Related papers: Formation and evolution of planetary systems: the …
Recent adaptive optics systems in astronomy achieve high-angular resolution. With the extreme stability of the images, detection at very low fluxes can be reached using a coronograph at the diffraction limit of the telescopes. This paper is…
Using Hubble Space Telescope images of 119 young planetary nebulae, most of which have not previously been published, we have devised a comprehensive morphological classification system for these objects. This system generalizes a recently…
Newly formed stars are often observed to possess circumstellar disks, from which mass continues to be accreted onto the star and fed into outflowing jets, and which eventually may evolve into dusty debris disks and planetary systems. Recent…
Few scientific discoveries have captured the public imagination like the explosion of exoplanetary science during the past two decades. This work has fundamentally changed our picture of Earth's place in the Universe and led NASA to make…
Planets are born from the gas and dust discs surrounding young stars. Energetic radiation from the central star can drive thermal outflows from the discs atmospheres, strongly affecting the evolution of the discs and the nascent planetary…
The study of stellar populations is a discipline that is highly dependent on both imaging and spectroscopy. I discuss techniques in different regimes of resolving power: broadband imaging (R~4), intermediate band imaging (R~16, 64),…
To study large-scale structure in the Universe a full census of the contents are required. This is even more important when the processes of galaxy formation are being investigated. In the last year the population of distant galaxies that…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
Gas giant planets, if present, are the most massive objects in a planetary system and play a pivotal role in shaping its overall architecture. The formation of these planets has constantly been a central issue in planetary science.…
Star-forming regions have been the targets of X-ray observations since the dawn of satellite X-ray astronomy. The increase in sensitivity and/or spatial resolution offered by XMM-Newton and Chandra allows a dramatic improvement, both…
There has been remarkable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies of galaxy formation and evolution. Largely due to a combination of deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging, Keck spectroscopy, and COBE far-IR background…
High-contrast near-infrared imaging of the nearby star HR 8799 has shown three giant planets. Such images were possible due to the wide orbits (> 25 AU) and youth (< 100 Myr) of the imaged planets, which are still hot and bright as they…
A new generation of telescopes with mirror diameters of 20 m or more, called extremely large telescopes (ELTs) has the potential to provide unprecedented imaging and spectroscopy of exo-planetary systems, if the difficulties in achieving…
Since the first detection of intracluster planetary nebulae in 1996, imaging and spectroscopic surveys identified such stars to trace the radial extent and the kinematics of diffuse light in clusters. This topic of research is tightly…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…
In the past decade, our understanding of how stars and galaxies formed during the first 5 billion years after the Big Bang has been revolutionized by observations that leverage gravitational lensing by intervening masses, which act as…
Spurred by the discovery of numerous exoplanets in multiple systems, binaries have become in recent years one of the main topics in planet formation research. Numerous studies have investigated to what extent the presence of a stellar…
Planet formation is a hugely dynamic process requiring the transport, concentration and assimilation of gas and dust to form the first planetesimals and cores. With access to extremely high spatial and spectral resolution observations at…
Stars and planets can be seen as the second fundamental building blocks of baryons in the universe (only second to the dust and gas in molecular clouds). Their formation involves dust grain growth of many orders of magnitude and a myriad of…
This chapter discusses the use and possibilities of optical and infrared interferometry to study star formation. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the star formation process and highlights the open questions from an observational…