Related papers: ASTRO-H White Paper - New Spectral Features
The ESA Gaia mission has revolutionized our understanding of the white dwarf population, delivering an unprecedented census of these nearby remnants and revealing previously unseen structures in the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram.…
This chapter for the new CUP book "Compact Stellar Sources" reviews the state of work on multi-wavelength observations of high mass and low mass X-ray binaries. Both neutron star and black hole systems are considered for this work.
Nuclear Astrophysics is a field at the intersection of nuclear physics and astrophysics, which seeks to understand the nuclear engines of astronomical objects and the origin of the chemical elements. This white paper summarizes progress and…
Exploring dark matter via observations of extreme astrophysical environments -- defined here as heavy compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes, as well as supernovae and compact object merger events -- has been a…
Understanding stellar evolution and its effect on planetary systems is crucial for correctly interpreting the chemical constraints of exo-planetary material that can be given to us by white dwarfs. This article will describe how asteroids,…
The past few years have seen several breakthroughs in particle astrophysics and cosmology. In several cases, new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. In this talk I summarize some of these…
High-mass X-ray binary systems are powered by the stellar wind of their donor stars. The X-ray state of Cygnus X-1 is correlated with the properties of the wind which defines the environment of mass accretion. Chandra-HETGS observations…
The propagation of very high energy gamma-rays ($E>100$~GeV) over cosmological distances is suppressed by pair-production processes with the ubiquitous extra-galactic soft photon background, mainly in the optical to near infra-red. The…
Solar wind charged particles interact with diffuse gas within the heliosphere, producing soft X-rays. This solar wind charge exchange (SWCX) process produces foreground emission that complicates interpretation of X-ray observations. In this…
X-ray spectroscopy offers an opportunity to study the complex mixture of emitting and absorbing components in the circumnuclear regions of active galactic nuclei, and to learn about the accretion process that fuels AGN and the feedback of…
This white paper provides a comprehensive review of our present understanding of experimental neutrino anomalies that remain unresolved, charting the progress achieved over the last decade at the experimental and phenomenological level, and…
I review the current status of neutrino astrophysics, including solar neutrinos; atmospheric neutrinos; neutrino mass and oscillations; supernova neutrinos; neutrino nucleosynthesis (Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the neutrino process, the…
High-energy astrophysics is a relatively young scientific field, made possible by space-borne telescopes. During the half-century history of x-ray astronomy, the sensitivity of focusing x-ray telescopes-through finer angular resolution and…
Extensive programs of follow-up observations of hard X-ray selected sources have unambiguosly revealed that the sources of the X-ray background are characterized by an extremely large dispersion in their optical magnitude and spectroscopic…
The physics of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays will be reviewed, discussing the latest experimental results and theoretical models aiming at explaining the observations in terms of spectra, mass composition and possible sources. It will be…
We report on recent progress in our theoretical understanding of X-ray binaries, which has largely been driven by new observations, and illustrate the interplay between theory and observations considering as examples intermediate-mass X-ray…
The cores of active galactic nuclei (AGN) harbor some of the most extreme conditions of matter and energy in the Universe. One of the major goals of high-energy astrophysics is to probe these extreme environments in the vicinity of…
Broad band X-ray spectra of high statistical quality obtained with the EPIC instruments on XMM-Newton are being used to address key issues in AGN Physics, including the evidence for strong gravity, massive and energetic outflows and the…
Over the last decades X-ray spectroscopy has proven to be a powerful tool for the estimation of black hole spin and several other key parameters in dozens of AGN and black hole X-ray binaries. In this White Paper, we discuss the…
Spectroscopy of redshifted radio absorption of atomic and molecular species provide excellent probes of the cold component of the gas in the early Universe which can be used to address many important issues, such as measuring baryonic…