Related papers: Astronomical technology - the past and the future
The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and…
The discovery of cosmic acceleration is one of the most important developments in modern cosmology. The observation, thirteen years ago, that type Ia supernovae appear dimmer that they would have been in a decelerating universe followed by…
This chapter provides an overview of the techniques of radio astronomy. This study began in 1931 with Jansky's discovery of emission from the cosmos, but the period of rapid progress began fifteen years later. From then to the present, the…
High precision astrometry provides the foundation to resolve many fundamental problems in astrophysics. The application of astrometric studies spans a wide range of fields, and has undergone enormous growth in recent years. This is as a…
Space-based time-domain telescopes such as CoRoT, Kepler/K2 and TESS have profoundly impacted astrophysics over the past two decades. Continuous light curves with high cadence and high photometric precision are now available for millions of…
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 scientific research begins in the context of the then-contemporary state of knowledge of the field and moves toward a deeper understanding of the subject. This colloquium presents the Arecibo telescope$^{'}$s contribution to radio…
Over the past ten years, the concept of adaptive optics has evolved from early experimental stages to a standard observing tool now available at almost all major optical and near-infrared telescope facilities. Adaptive optics will also be…
In this short review, we trace the evolution of inference in astronomy, highlighting key milestones rather than providing an exhaustive survey. We focus on the shift from classical optimization to Bayesian inference, the rise of…
In the past decade, observational cosmology has had one of the most exciting periods in the past century. The precision with which we have been able to measure cosmological parameters has increased tremendously, while at the same time, we…
Radio detection of extensive air showers initiated in the Earth's atmosphere has made tremendous progress in the last decade. Today, radio detection is routinely used in several cosmic-ray observatories. The physics of the radio emission in…
Optical long-baseline interferometry is a unique and powerful technique for astronomical research. Since 2004, optical interferometers have produced an increasing number of scientific papers covering various fields of astrophysics. As…
Scientific research is a continuous process, and the speed of future progress can be estimated by the pace of finding explanations for previous research questions. In this observers based view of stellar pulsation and asteroseismology, we…
Large astronomical instruments using tens to hundreds of optical or infrared science detectors pose specific challenges for detector control, where, in addition to performance, other engineering aspects like scalability, power consumption,…
The large surveys and sensitive instruments of modern astronomy are turning ever more examples of variable objects, many of which are extending the parameter space to testing theories of stellar evolution and accretion. Future projects such…
Despite the large budgets spent annually on astronomical research equipment such as telescopes, instruments and supercomputers, the general trend is to analyse and view the resulting datasets using small, two-dimensional displays. We report…
Overview of the determination of astronomical distances from a metrological standpoint. Distances are considered from the Solar System (planetary distances) to extragalactic distances, with a special emphasis on the fundamental step of the…
In no other field of astrophysics has the impact of new instrumentation been as substantial as in the domain of exoplanets. Before 1995 our knowledge about exoplanets was mainly based on philosophical and theoretical considerations. The…
Astronomy is entering a new era as multiple, large area, digital sky surveys are in production. The resulting datasets are truly remarkable in their own right; however, a revolutionary step arises in the aggregation of complimentary…
Progress in astronomy comes from interpreting the signals encoded in the light received from distant objects: the distribution of light over the sky (images), over photon wavelength (spectrum), over polarization angle, and over time…