Related papers: Next-generation Astronomy
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is realizing global electronic integration of astronomy data. One of the long-term goals of the U.S. VO project, the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO), is development of services and protocols that respond…
Experience suggests that structural issues in how institutional Astrophysics approaches data-driven science and the development of discovery technology may be hampering the community's ability to respond effectively to a rapidly changing…
I review the status of science with wide field surveys. For many decades surveys have been the backbone of astronomy, and the main engine of discovery, as we have mapped the sky at every possible wavelength. Surveys are an efficient use of…
Gravitational wave astronomy has emerged as a new branch of observational astronomy, since the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. The current number of $O(100)$ detections is expected to grow by several orders of magnitude over…
The challenges of multi-wavelength astrophysics require new outlooks from those appropriate to traditional astronomy. The next generation of research scientists must be trained to exploit the potentiality now being provided for the first…
The amount of data produced by large observational facilities and space missions has led to the archiving and on-line accessibility of much of this data, available to the entire astronomical community. This allows a much wider…
Astronomy depends on ever increasing computing power. Processor clock-rates have plateaued, and increased performance is now appearing in the form of additional processor cores on a single chip. This poses significant challenges to the…
Astronomers have come to recognize the benefits of photonics, often in combination with optical systems, in solving longstanding experimental problems in Earth-based astronomy. Here, we explore some of the recent advances made possible by…
Astrophysics facilities have been of tremendous importance for planetary science. The flagship space observatory Hubble Space Telescope has produced ground-breaking Solar System science, but when launched it did not even have the capability…
Most major scientific results produced by ground-based gamma-ray telescopes in the last 30 years have been obtained by expert members of the collaborations operating these instruments. This is due to the proprietary data and software…
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…
Time-domain astronomy (TDA) is facing a paradigm shift caused by the exponential growth of the sample size, data complexity and data generation rates of new astronomical sky surveys. For example, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST),…
Nowadays there is no field research which is not flooded with data. Among the sciences, Astrophysics has always been driven by the analysis of massive amounts of data. The development of new and more sophisticated observation facilities,…
The National Academy of Science Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, in its new Decadal survey entitled Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium, recommends, as a first priority, the establishment of a National Virtual…
Artificial intelligence technology has been widely used in astronomy, and new artificial intelligence technologies and application scenarios are constantly emerging. There have been a large number of papers reviewing the application of…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of…
An emerging theme in modern astrophysics is the connection between astronomical observations and the underlying physical phenomena that drive our cosmos. Both the mechanisms responsible for the observed astrophysical phenomena and the tools…
A virtual observatory will not only enhance many current scientific investigations, but it will also enable entirely new scientific explorations due to both the federation of vast amounts of multiwavelength data and the new archival…
Large-scale photometric surveys are revolutionizing astronomy by delivering unprecedented amounts of data. The rich data sets from missions such as the NASA Kepler and TESS satellites, and the upcoming ESA PLATO mission, are a treasure…