Related papers: Discovery & Depth
We review some aspects of the current state of data-intensive astronomy, its methods, and some outstanding data analysis challenges. Astronomy is at the forefront of "big data" science, with exponentially growing data volumes and data…
This is a (very) personal attempt to summarize the status of neutrino astronomy: its scientific motivations, our understanding of natural water and ice as particle detectors and, finally, the detector technology.
The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…
NASA's Great Observatories have opened up the electromagnetic spectrum from space, providing sustained access to wavelengths not accessible from the ground. Together, Hubble, Compton, Chandra, and Spitzer have provided the scientific…
High energy astrophysics has made good use of combined high energy (X-ray, gamma-ray) and radio observations to uncover connections between outbursts, accretion, particle acceleration and kinetic feedback to the local ambient medium. In the…
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,…
Some attempts to predict the very distant future of Radio Astronomy are given. It is not easy to predict a list of the first priority problems which may appear, but the facilities potential is more predictable. It is suggested, that in…
We review some key issues pertaining to NASA's Research and Analysis programs, and offer recommended actions to mitigate or resolve these issues. In particular, we recommended that NASA increases funding to support a healthy selection rate…
Over its more than thirty-year history, the Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation (ATI) program has provided grants to support technology development and instrumentation for ground-based astronomy. Through a combination of automated…
The Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics created five panels to identify the science themes that would define the field's research frontiers in the coming decade. I will describe the conclusions of one of these, the Panel on…
In the ROSAT era of the mid-1990's, the problems facing deep X-ray surveys could be largely solved with 10 m class telescopes. In the first decade of this new millennium, with X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
Over the past decade, research in resolved stellar populations has made great strides in exploring the nature of dark matter, in unraveling the star formation, chemical enrichment, and dynamical histories of the Milky Way and nearby…
Dwarf galaxies ($M_{\star} \lesssim 10^{9} M_{\odot}$) are the most numerous galaxies in the Universe and critical probes of dark matter, baryonic feedback, and galaxy formation. Despite significant progress from wide-field imaging surveys,…
This is the report of the Ultraviolet-Optical Working Group (UVOWG) commissioned by NASA to study the scientific rationale for new missions in ultraviolet/optical space astronomy approximately ten years from now, when the Hubble Space…
Neutrino astrophysics offers new perspectives on the Universe investigation: high energy neutrinos, produced by the most energetic phenomena in our Galaxy and in the Universe, carry complementary (if not exclusive) information about the…
Neutrino astronomy has entered an exciting time with the completion of the first km3-scale neutrino telescope at the South Pole (IceCube) and the successful operation of the first under-sea neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean (Antares).…
NASA's proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission will discover thousands of exoplanets with separations from the habitable zone out to unbound planets, using the technique of gravitational microlensing. The Study Analysis Group 11 of the NASA Exoplanet…
Synoptic sky surveys are becoming the largest data generators in astronomy, and they are opening a new research frontier, that touches essentially every field of astronomy. Opening of the time domain to a systematic exploration will…
As the Cosmology and Fundamental Physics (CFP) panel is fully aware, the next decade will see major advances in our understanding of these areas of research. To quote from their charge, these advances will occur in studies of the early…