Related papers: Sterrekundig Instituut Utrecht: The Last Years
The Pierre Auger Observatory is the world's largest operating detection system for the observation of ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). The detector allows detailed measurements of their energy spectrum, mass composition and arrival…
Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be a key facility for small body science in planetary astronomy over the next decade. It will carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), observing the sky repeatedly in u, g, r, i, z, and y over the…
Astronomy and Astrophysics is an observational science dealing with celestial objects. Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) is one of the premier institutions in astronomy and astrophysics and has contributed…
Strategic Plan for Astronomy in the Netherlands 2011 - 2020, written by the Netherlands Committee for Astronomy (NCA), on behalf of the excellence research school in astronomy NOVA, (combining the university astronomy institutes of the…
This brief article presents the introduction and draft of the fundamental ideas developed at length in the book of the same title, which gives a challenging point of view about science and its history/philosophy/sociology. Science is in…
In the present paper I want to tell of my impressions about the world of research in astrophysics, which I know from close observation. I see with certain pessimism the actual state of astrophysics, as well as of other sciences with similar…
As a scientific discipline, Astronomy is rather unique. We only have one laboratory, the Universe, and we cannot, of course, change the initial conditions and study the resulting effects. On top of this, acquiring Astronomical data has…
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
Betelgeuse is one of the most magnificent stars in the sky, and one of the nearest red supergiants. Astronomers gathered in Paris in the Autumn of 2012 to decide what we know about its structure, behaviour, and past and future evolution,…
The Spitzer Space Telescope, born as the Shuttle Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) and later the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (still SIRTF), was under discussion and development within NASA and the scientific community for more than…
Here we report some results from an ESO-VLT programme to observe individual stars in nearby dwarf galaxies at high resolution with the UVES spectrograph (Tolstoy, Venn, Shetrone, Primas, Hill, Kaufer & Szeifert 2002, submitted to AJ). We…
Abridged: The golden age of astrophysics is upon us with both grand discoveries (extra-solar planets, dark matter, dark energy) and precision cosmology. Fundamental understanding of the working of stars and galaxies is within reach, thanks…
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.
The new SAI MSU observatory 2.5-meter telescope and capabilities of its current instrumentation are described. The facility operates actively since 2014 in parallel to the engineering works. It has delivered a number of prominent results in…
The motivation, physics objectives, and technical strategy of a upgrade to the Pierre Auger Observatory are discussed.
After more than half a century of community support related to the science of "solar activity'', IAU's Commission 10 was formally discontinued in 2015, to be succeeded by C.E2 with the same area of responsibility. On this occasion, we look…
During its annual conference in 2024, the French Society of Astronomy \& Astrophysics (SF2A) hosted, for the fourth time, a special session dedicated to discussing the environmental transition within the French astrophysics research…
We present the archive of the wide-field plate observations obtained at the University Observatory Jena, which is stored at the Astrophysical Institute of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The archive contains plates taken in the…
While space-based telescopes have had a part to play ultimately I feel that it is telescopes like myself that have contributed the most to pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. With current advances in optical engineering we have the…
Forty years ago I spent a year with my family at the Sacramento Peak Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico. In August 2017 the U.S. National Solar Observatory ended its presence there with a Farewell Workshop. These reminiscences are in that…