Related papers: Cross-disciplinary research in astronomy
Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. Carbon and heavier elements are created inside stars and are ejected when they die. From the spatial distribution of elements in galaxies, it is therefore possible to…
Cosmic magnetic fields are an integral component of the interstellar medium (ISM), having influence on scales ranging from star formation to galactic dynamics. While observations of external galaxies offer a `birds-eye-view' of magnetic…
Essentially everything of astronomical interest is either part of a galaxy, or from a galaxy, or otherwise relevant to the origin or evolution of galaxies. Diverse examples are that the isotropic composition of meteorites provides clues to…
Reactions between atomic nuclei are measured in great detail in terrestrial laboratory experiments; transferring and extrapolating this knowledge to how the same reactions act within cosmic environments presents major challenges.…
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…
For the past 400 years, astronomers have sought to observe and interpret the Universe by building more powerful telescopes. These incredible instruments extend the capabilities of one of our most important senses, sight, towards new limits…
Scientific research is a continuous process, and the speed of future progress can be estimated by the pace of finding explanations for previous research questions. In this observers based view of stellar pulsation and asteroseismology, we…
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online…
The main achievements, current developments and prospects of molecular studies in external galaxies are reviewed. They are put in the context of the results of several decades of studies of molecules in local interstellar medium, their…
(Abridged from Executive Summary) This white paper focuses on the interdisciplinary fields of astrostatistics and astroinformatics, in which modern statistical and computational methods are applied to and developed for astronomical data.…
In order to account for the observable Universe, any comprehensive theory or model of cosmology must draw from many disciplines of physics, including gauge theories of strong and weak interactions, the hydrodynamics and microphysics of…
The chemical abundances in the atmosphere of a star provide unique information about the gas from which that star formed, and, modulo processes that are not important for the vast majority of stars, such as mass transfer in close binary…
Understanding the galaxy in which we live is one of the great intellectual challenges facing modern science. With the advent of high quality observational data, the chemical evolution modeling of our galaxy has been the subject of numerous…
Scientists in all domains face a data avalanche - both from better instruments and from improved simulations. We believe that computer science tools and computer scientists are in a position to help all the sciences by building tools and…
We describe observations in the nearby universe (<100 Mpc) with a 10-m or larger space-based telescope having imaging and spectral capabilities in the range 912-9000 \AA that would enable advances in the fields of massive stars, young…
Over the last five decades, AGN studies have produced a number of spectacular examples of synergies and multifaceted approaches in astrophysics. The field of AGN research now spans the entire spectral range and covers more than twelve…
The tightest and most robust cosmological results of the next decade will be achieved by bringing together multiple surveys of the Universe. This endeavor has to happen across multiple layers of the data processing and analysis, e.g.,…
As many research papers in astronomy have been written since the beginning of the 21st century as had been written previously. This exponential growth has been accompanied by substantial changes in the structure of astrophysics research,…
The existence of an arc statistics problem was at the center of a strong debate in the last fifteen years. With the aim to clarify if the optical depth for giant gravitational arcs by galaxy clusters in the so called concordance model is…