Related papers: Science cases for a visible interferometer
In the last decade, the Kepler and CoRoT space-photometry missions have demonstrated the potential of asteroseismology as a novel, versatile and powerful tool to perform exquisite tests of stellar physics, and to enable precise and accurate…
The field of gamma-ray astronomy has experienced impressive progress over the last decade. Thanks to the advent of a new generation of imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, VERITAS) and thanks to the launch of the Fermi-LAT…
The very inner structure of massive YSOs is difficult to trace. With conventional observational methods we often identify structures still several hundreds of AU in size. But we also need information about the innermost regions where the…
Recent proposals have been advanced to apply imaging air Cherenkov telescope arrays to stellar intensity interferometry (SII). Of particular interest is the possibility of model-independent image recovery afforded by the good (u, v)-plane…
X-ray observations of galaxies have grown from a curiosity into a full-fledged field of astronomy. These observations provide unique information on black holes, binary stars, and the hot phase of the ISM, which can be used to constrain the…
High angular resolution observations at optical wavelengths provide valuable insights in stellar astrophysics, directly measuring fundamental stellar parameters, and probing stellar atmospheres, circumstellar disks, elongation of rapidly…
Current X-ray observations and simulations show that gravitational lensing can be used to infer the structure near the event horizons of black holes, constrain the dynamics and evolution of black-hole accretion and outflows, test general…
This white paper gives a brief summary of the time domain science that has been performed with the JCMT in recent years and highlights the opportunities for continuing work in this field over the next decade. The main focus of this document…
Horizon-scale imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has provided transformative insights into supermassive black holes but its resolution and scope are limited by ground-based constraints such as the size of the Earth, its…
Gamma-rays provide a powerful insight into the non-thermal universe and perhaps a unique probe for new physics beyond the standard model. Current experiments are already giving results in the physics of acceleration of cosmic rays in…
More than 60 years have passed since the first formal suggestion to use strongly-lensed supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the Universe through time-delay cosmography. Yet, fewer than 10 such objects have ever been discovered. We…
The exquisite precision delivered by interferometric techniques is rapidly being applied to more and more branches of optical astronomy. One particularly successful strategy to obtain structures at the scale of the diffraction limit is…
This White Paper presents the scientific motivations for a multi-object spectrograph (MOS) on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The MOS case draws on all fields of contemporary astronomy, from extra-solar planets, to the study…
GRAVITY is a new instrument to coherently combine the light of the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope Interferometer to form a telescope with an equivalent 130 m diameter angular resolution and a collecting area of 200…
Microlensing events provide a unique capacity to study the stellar remnant population of the Galaxy. Optical microlensing suffers from a near complete degeneracy between the mass, the velocity and the distance. However, a subpopulation of…
Optical interferometry is a powerful technique to achieve high angular resolution. However, its main issue is its lack of sensitivity, compared to other observation techniques. Efforts have been made in the previous decade to improve the…
Atmospheric turbulence is an important limit to high angular resolution in astronomy. Interferometry resolved this issue by filtering the incoming light with single-mode fibers. Thanks to this technique, we obtained with the IOTA…
The Narrabri intensity interferometer was successfully used until 1974 to observe 32 stars, all brighter than B=+2.5, among which some were found to have an angular diameter as small as 0.41+/-0.03 milli-arc-seconds (mas). The technique was…
This paper develops a few science cases, using the PRIMA far-IR probe, aimed at achieving several breakthroughs in our understanding of the dust properties and their evolution. We argue that the specific observational capabilities of PRIMA,…
Within ten years, the era of large-scale systematics surveys will decay thanks to a complete census of exoplanetary systems within 200 pc from the Sun. With the first Lights foreseen between 2024 and 2028, the new generation of extremely…