Related papers: The exploration of the unknown
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…
Astronomy and related fields are at the forefront of science and technology; answering fundamental questions and driving innovation. Although blue-skies research like astronomy rarely contributes directly with tangible outcomes on a short…
Radio pulsars are unique laboratories for a wide range of physics and astrophysics. Understanding how they are created, how they evolve and where we find them in the Galaxy, with or without binary companions, is highly constraining of…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
We discuss the extent to which the visibility of the heavens was a necessary condition for the development of science, with particular reference to the measurement of time. Our conclusion is that while astronomy had significant importance,…
The history of science reveals that major discoveries are not predictable. Naively, one might conclude therefore that it is not possible to artificially cultivate an environment that promotes discoveries. I suggest instead that open…
Radioactivity was discovered as a by-product of searching for elements with suitable chemical properties. Understanding its characteristics led to the development of nuclear physics, understanding that unstable configurations of nucleons…
The SKA telescopes will bring unparalleled sensitivity across a broad radio band, a wide field of view across the Southern sky, and the capacity for sub-arraying, all of which make them the ideal instruments for studying the pulsar…
A precise understanding of the radio emission from extensive air showers is of fundamental importance for the design of cosmic ray radio detectors as well as the analysis and interpretation of their data. In recent years, tremendous…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
The changing heavens have played a central role in the scientific effort of astronomers for centuries. Galileo's synoptic observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus starting in 1610, provided strong refutation of Ptolemaic…
The objective of neutrino astronomy, born with the identification of thermonuclear fusion in the sun and the particle processes controlling the fate of a nearby supernova, is to build instruments which reach throughout and far beyond our…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
Of all high-energy particles, only neutrinos can directly convey astronomical information from the edge of the universe---and from deep inside the most cataclysmic high-energy processes. Copiously produced in high-energy collisions,…
Modern astronomy increasingly relies upon systematic surveys, whose dedicated telescopes continuously observe the sky across varied wavelength ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum; some surveys also observe non-electromagnetic…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
Artificial intelligence technology has been widely used in astronomy, and new artificial intelligence technologies and application scenarios are constantly emerging. There have been a large number of papers reviewing the application of…
Despite their relative sparseness, during the recent years it has become more and more clear that extragalactic radio sources (both AGN and star-forming galaxies) constitute an extremely interesting mix of populations, not only because of…
This lecture briefly reviews the major recent advances in radio astronomy made possible by ultra-deep surveys, reaching microJansky flux density levels. A giant step forward in many fields, including the study of the evolution of the cosmic…