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Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
As astronomers, we are living an exciting time for what concerns the search for other worlds. Recent discoveries have already deeply impacted our vision of planetary formation and architectures. Future bio-signature discoveries will…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
The NASA Discovery mission EPOXI, utilizing the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft, comprises two phases: EPOCh (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization) and DIXI (Deep Impact eXtended Investigation). With EPOCh, we use the 30-cm high…
The new frontier of cosmology will be led by three-dimensional surveys of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Based on its all-sky surveys and redshift depth, the SKA is destined to revolutionize cosmology, in combination with future…
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion is a fundamental challenge to standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The new physics of dark energy may lie in the nature of gravity, the quantum vacuum, or extra dimensions. I give a…
The next decade affords tremendous opportunity to achieve the goals of Galactic archaeology. That is, to reconstruct the evolutionary narrative of the Milky Way, based on the empirical data that describes its current morphological,…
In the late 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae led to the astounding discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The explanation of this anomalous acceleration has been one of the great problems in physics since…
The past decade began with the first light of ALMA and will end at the start of the new era of hyperdimensional astrophysics. Our community-wide movement toward highly multiwavelength and multidimensional datasets has enabled immense…
The field of exoplanetary science has emerged over the past two decades, rising up alongside traditional solar system planetary science. Both fields focus on understanding the processes which form and sculpt planets through time, yet there…
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…
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…
The global climate crisis poses new risks to humanity, and with them, new challenges to the practices of professional astronomy. Avoiding the more catastrophic consequences of global warming by more than 1.5 degrees requires an immediate…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), in its thirteen years of operation, has allowed us to observe properties of the universe humans have been able, until very recently, to probe only with their thoughts. This review presents a brief summary…
Ice giants are the only unexplored class of planet in our Solar System. Much that we currently know about these systems challenges our understanding of how planets, rings, satellites, and magnetospheres form and evolve. We assert that an…
A general overview of the understanding of our Galaxy is presented following the lines of its main structures: halo, disc, bulge/bar. This review is emphasising some "Time Domain Astronomy" contributions. On the one hand the distance and…
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…
As a community, our goal is to understand the fundamental nature of energy, matter, space, and time, and to apply that knowledge to understand the birth, evolution and fate of the universe. Our scope is broad and we use many tools:…
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…