Related papers: ACCESS: Enabling an Improved Flux Scale for Astrop…
In the last years the direct measurement of cosmic rays received a push forward by the possibility of conducting experiments on board long duration balloon flights, satellites and on the International Space Station. The increase in the…
Exoplanets have sparked interest in extremely high signal-to-noise ratio spectroscopic observations of very bright stars, in a regime where flux calibrators, in particular DA white dwarfs, are not available. We argue that A-type stars offer…
From natural guide star adaptive optics data taken with the Come-On Plus and with the Starfire Optical Range Generation II instruments in the JHK bands and in the I band respectively, we describe and analyse the point spread function. The…
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…
A new all-sky visible and Near-InfraRed (NIR) space astrometry mission with a wavelength cutoff in the K-band is not just focused on a single or small number of key science cases. Instead, it is extremely broad, answering key science…
We present a short (and necessarily incomplete) review of the evidence for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The most direct probe of acceleration relies on the detailed study of supernovae (SN) of type Ia. Assuming that these are…
Following on from the second release of calibrated photometry from IPHAS, the INT/WFC Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane, we present incompleteness-corrected stellar density maps in the r and i photometric bands.…
A challenge in absolute calibration is to relate very bright stars with physical flux measurements to faint ones within range of modern instruments, e.g. those on large groundbased telescopes or on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We…
Super-resolution (SR) advances astronomical imaging by enabling cost-effective high-resolution capture, crucial for detecting faraway celestial objects and precise structural analysis. However, existing datasets for astronomical SR (ASR)…
Fluctuations in the brightness of the background radiation can lead to confusion with real point sources. Such background emission confusion will be important for infrared observations with relatively large beam sizes since the amount of…
That the laws of physics are the same at all times and places throughout the Universe is one of the basic assumptions of physics. Astronomical observations provide the only means to test this basic assumption on cosmological time and…
In order to facilitate the identification of possible new physics signatures in neutrino telescopes, such as neutrinos from the annihilation of neutralinos or decaying relics, it is essential to gain full control over the astrophysical…
Observations conducted over the last few decades show that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. In the standard model of cosmology, this accelerated expansion is attributed to a dark energy in the form of a cosmological constant.…
Dark matter comprises the bulk of the matter in the universe but its particle nature and cosmological origin remain mysterious. Knowledge of the dark matter density distribution in the Milky Way Galaxy is crucial to both our understanding…
The accelerating expansion of the universe is one of the most profound discoveries in modern cosmology, pointing to a universe in which 70% of the mass-energy density has an unknown form spread uniformly across the universe. This result has…
High precision spectrographs can enable not only the discovery of exoplanets, but can also provide a fundamental measurement in Galactic dynamics. Over about ten year baselines, the expected change in the line-of-sight velocity due to the…
It is critical for James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) science that instrumental units are converted to physical units. We detail the design of the JWST absolute flux calibration program that has the core goal of ensuring a robust flux…
Ground-based surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time require photometric calibration that is both long-term stable and spatially uniform at the sub-per cent level, even during non-photometric…
The cause for the observed acceleration in the expansion of the universe is unknown, and referred to as "dark energy" for convenience. Dark energy could be an unknown energy component, or a modification of Einstein's general relativity.…
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…