Related papers: The Sooner: a Large Robotic Telescope
Balloon-borne astronomy is unique in that it allows for a level of image stability, resolution, and optical backgrounds that are comparable to space-borne systems due to greatly reduced atmospheric interference, but at a fraction of the…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
An extremely sensitive all-sky survey will be carried out in the millimetre/submillimetre waveband by the forthcoming ESA mission Planck Surveyor. The main scientific goal of the mission is to make very accurate measurements of the spatial…
The historical development of ground based astronomical telescopes leads us to expect that space-based astronomical telescopes will need to be operational for many decades. The exchange of scientific instruments in space will be a…
The Hubble Space Telescope has produced astonishing science over the past thirty years. Hubble's productivity can continue to soar for years to come provided some worn out components get upgraded. While powerful new ground-based and space…
The Stellar Observations Network Group prototype telescope at the Teide Observatory has been operating in scientific mode since March 2014. The first year of observations has entirely been carried out using the high resolution echelle…
In the past decades, the phenomenology of fast time variations of high-energy flux from black-hole binaries has increased, thanks to the availability of more and more sophisticated space observatories, and a complex picture has emerged.…
Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high…
This Horizon Study describes a next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave observatory: Cosmic Explorer. With ten times the sensitivity of Advanced LIGO, Cosmic Explorer will push gravitational-wave astronomy towards the edge of the…
Light bosonic fields may suffer an instability around a rotating compact object. This process, known as superradiance, leads to the exponential amplification of the field around a black hole or neutron star, while the spin of the central…
The Galactic center offers us a unique opportunity to test General Relativity (GR) with the orbits of stars around a supermassive black hole. Observations of these stars have been one of the great successes of adaptive optics on 8-10 m…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly map the dark matter in the universe and measure cosmological parameters. Current weak lensing surveys are limited by the atmospheric seeing from the ground and by the small…
Real-time seeing and outer scale estimation at the location of the focus of a telescope is fundamental for the adaptive optics systems dimensioning and performance prediction, as well as for the operational aspects of instruments. This…
Tracing the formation and evolution of all supermassive black holes, including the obscured ones, understanding how black holes influence their surroundings and how matter behaves under extreme conditions, are recognized as key science…
Strong lensing is a powerful tool to address three major astrophysical issues: understanding the spatial distribution of mass at kpc and sub-kpc scale, where baryons and dark matter interact to shape galaxies as we see them; determining the…
The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. Each GOTO robotic mount holds eight 40 cm telescopes, giving an overall…
The next decade promises an observational revolution which will change cosmology forever. The precise measurement of the angular anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background should specify to a few percent all of the parameters of the…
The ongoing optical time-domain astronomy surveys are routinely reporting fifty transient candidates per night. Here, I investigate the demographics of astronomical transients and supernova classifications reported to the Transient Name…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the most energetic events in the universe, offering insights into stellar collapse, extreme matter behavior, and cosmic evolution. The advent of multi-messenger astronomy, combining electromagnetic,…
Supermassive black hole binaries are the strongest gravitational wave sources in the universe. The systems most likely to be observed with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) will have particularly high masses ($\gtrsim 10^9 M_\odot$), long periods…