Related papers: Optical Synoptic Telescopes: New Science Frontiers
High precision astrometry provides the foundation to resolve many fundamental problems in astrophysics. The application of astrometric studies spans a wide range of fields, and has undergone enormous growth in recent years. This is as a…
I review some results of estimation of the power spectrum of density fluctuations from galaxy redshift surveys and discuss advances that may be possible with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I then examine the realities of power spectrum…
Powerful new observational facilities will come online over the next decade, enabling a number of discovery opportunities in the "Cosmic Frontier", which targets understanding of the physics of the early universe, dark matter and dark…
The digital revolution is transforming astronomy from a data-starved to a data-submerged science. Instruments such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and the Square Kilometer Array…
Multi-object spectroscopy has been a key technique contributing to the current era of 'precision cosmology'. From the first exploratory surveys of the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe to the current generation of superbly…
Cosmic surveys provide crucial information about high energy physics including strong evidence for dark energy, dark matter, and inflation. Ongoing and upcoming surveys will start to identify the underlying physics of these new phenomena,…
Space debris is a major threat to the satellite infrastructure. A collision with even small particle, e.g. 1 cm of size, can cause a catastrophic event when the parent body, spacecraft or upper stage, will break up into hundreds of…
Current and future continuum surveys being undertaken by the new generation of radio telescopes are now poised to address many important science questions, ranging from the earliest galaxies, to the physics of nearby AGN, as well as…
Nowadays, science has been coming into a new paradigm, called data-intensive science. While current studies of the new phenomenon focused on building up infrastructure for this new paradigm, yet a few studies concern users of scientific…
The contemporary astronomy is flooded with an exponentially growing petabyte-scaled data volumes produced by powerful ground and space-based instrumentation as well as a product of extensive computer simulations and computations of complex…
The discovery of cosmic radio emission by Karl Jansky in the course of searching for the source of interference to telephone communications and the instrumental advances which followed, have led to a series of new paradigm changing…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a project to definitively map $\pi$ steradians of the local Universe. An array of CCD detectors used in drift-scan mode will digitally image the sky in five passbands to a limiting magnitude of $r'…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
The history of stellar seismology suggests that observation and theory often take turns advancing our understanding. The recent tripling of the sample of pulsating white dwarfs generated by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey represents a giant…
Euclid and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) are poised to dramatically change the astronomy landscape early in the next decade. The combination of high cadence, deep, wide-field optical photometry from LSST with high resolution,…
Astronomy began as a visual science, first through careful observations of the sky using either an eyepiece or the naked eye, then on to the preservation of those images with photographic media and finally the digital encoding of that…
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 next decade will be an exciting period for solar astrophysics, as new ground- and space-based instrumentation will provide unprecedented observations of the solar atmosphere and heliosphere. The synergy between modeling effort and…
The answers to fundamental science questions in astrophysics, ranging from the history of the expansion of the universe to the sizes of nearby stars, hinge on our ability to make precise measurements of diverse astronomical objects. As our…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the effective beginning of large, systematic redshift surveys of galaxies. These surveys have had a major impact on observational cosmology and on our current understanding of large-scale structures…