Related papers: Pushing the limit of instrument capabilities
In its all-sky survey, the ESA global astrometry mission Gaia will perform high-precision astrometry and photometry for 1 billion stars down to $V = 20$ mag. The data collected in the Gaia catalogue, to be published by the end of the next…
It is now commonly accepted that globular clusters (GCs) have undergone a complex formation and that they host at least two stellar generations. This is a recent paradigm and is founded on both photometric and spectroscopic evidence. We…
We present some results of long term studies of pulsating stars conducted in the course of the OGLE and Araucaria projects. In particular very scarce eclipsing binaries containing pulsating stars are discussed. Such systems provide a unique…
Peculiar A stars are so named because they exhibit abundance peculiarities in their atmospheres. It is believed that these arise as a result of differentiation of chemical species in large magnetic spots in which convective mixing is…
The Gaia benchmark stars (GBS) are very bright stars of different late spectral types, luminosities and metallicities. They are well-known in the Galactic archaeology community because they are widely used to calibrate and validate the…
The observational basis for asteroseismology is being dramatically strengthened, through more than two years of data from the CoRoT satellite, the flood of data coming from the Kepler mission and, in the slightly longer term, from dedicated…
Over the last two decades, we have intensified our search for a ghost particle, with the hope that it would provide us with information on the darkest places of our Universe. This quest has been conducted from the deep caves of the Earth,…
I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…
Major improvements in models of chemically peculiar stars have been achieved in the past few years. With these new models it has been possible to test quantitatively some of the processes involved in the formation of abundance anomalies and…
Neutron stars are astrophysical laboratories of many extremes of physics. Their rich phenomenology provides insights into the state and composition of matter at densities which cannot be reached in terrestrial experiments. Since the core of…
The first direct observation of gravitational waves' action upon matter has recently been reported by the BICEP2 experiment. Advanced ground-based gravitational-wave detectors are being installed. They will soon be commissioned, and then…
Searches for millisecond pulsars (which we here loosely define as those with periods $<$ 20 ms) in the Galactic field have undergone a renaissance in the past five years. New or recently refurbished radio telescopes utilizing cooled…
Our initial impressions of astronomical objects was that they are inherently "static" over the course of any reasonably long observation. However, with the discovery of quasars and their scintillation in 1963-64, we learnt that there are…
The recent availability of special purpose computers designed for calculating gravitational interactions of N-bodies at extremely high speed has provided the means to model globular clusters on a star-by-star basis for the first time. By…
Low-frequency radio observations have been expected to serve as a powerful tool for Space Weather (SW) observations for decades. Radio observations are sensitive to a wide range of SW-related observations ranging from emissions from coronal…
The search for extrasolar Earth-like planets is underway. Over 100 extrasolar giant planets are known to orbit nearby sun-like stars, including several in multiple-planet systems. These planetary systems are stepping stones for the search…
A majority part of magnetic chemically peculiar (mCP) stars of the upper main sequence exhibits strictly periodic light, magnetic, radio, and spectral variations that can be fully explained by the model of a rigidly rotating main-sequence…
Empirical studies of the first generation of stars and quasars in the Universe will likely become feasible over the next decade. The Next Generation Space Telescope will provide direct imaging and photometry of sub-galactic objects at…
An earlier study of the Kepler Mission noise properties on time scales of primary relevance to detection of exoplanet transits found that higher than expected noise followed to a large extent from the stars, rather than instrument or data…
One of the most striking astrophysical phenomena today is the existence of cosmic ray particles with energies in excess of 10^20 eV. While their presence has been confirmed by a number of experiments, it is not clear where and how these…