Related papers: The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission
The Kepler spacecraft provided the first long-baseline, high-precision photometry for large numbers of stars. This enabled the discovery of thousands of new exoplanets, and the characterization of myriad astrophysical phenomena. However,…
Direct measurement of acceleration is a key scientific goal for both cosmology and exoplanets. For cosmology, the concept of redshift drift (more than 60 years old by the 2020s) could directly establish the…
This is a joint summary of the reports from the three Astrophysics Program Analysis Groups (PAGs) in response to the "Planning for the 2020 Decadal Survey" charge given by the Astrophysics Division Director Paul Hertz. This joint executive…
We observed the transiting super-Earth exoplanet GJ1214b using Warm Spitzer at 4.5 microns wavelength during a 20-day quasi-continuous sequence in May 2011. The goals of our long observation were to accurately define the infrared transit…
We review the main advances brought by the Spitzer Space Telescope in the field of nearby galaxies studies, concentrating on a few subject areas, including: (1) the physics of the Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons that generate the…
SPECULOOS is a ground-based transit survey consisting of six identical 1-m robotic telescopes. The immediate goal of the project is to detect temperate terrestrial planets transiting nearby ultracool dwarfs (late M-dwarf stars and brown…
In today's mailing, Hogg et al. propose image modeling techniques to maintain 10-ppm-level precision photometry in Kepler data with only two working reaction wheels. While these results are relevant to many scientific goals for the…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will embark in 2018 on a 2-year wide-field survey mission, discovering over a thousand terrestrial, super-Earth and sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets potentially suitable for follow-up…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has been designed in order to satisfy several different scientific objectives that can be addressed by a ten-year synoptic sky survey. However, LSST will also provide a large amount of data that…
The recently launched NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is going to collect lightcurves for a few hundred million of stars and we expect to increase the number of pulsating stars to analyze compared to the few…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is expected to increase known small solar system object populations by an order of magnitude or more over the next decade, enabling a broad array of transformative solar system science…
WFIRST is NASA's first flagship mission with pre-defined core science programs to study dark energy and perform a statistical census of wide orbit exoplanets with a gravitational microlensing survey. Together, these programs are expected to…
A transiting planet invites us to measure its size, mass, orbital parameters, atmospheric composition, and other characteristics. But the invitation can only be accepted if the host star is bright enough for precise measurements of its flux…
Due to the efforts by numerous ground-based surveys and NASA's Kepler and TESS, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of transiting exoplanets ideal for atmospheric characterization via spectroscopy with large platforms such as JWST and…
The Wide-field Spectroscopic Telescope (WST) is proposed as a new facility dedicated to the efficient delivery of spectroscopic surveys. This white paper summarises the initial concept as well as the corresponding science cases. WST will…
The Astro2020 Decadal Survey recognizes time-domain astronomy as a key science area over the next decade and beyond. With over 30 years of HST data and the potential for 20 years of JWST operations, these flagship observatories offer an…
Exoplanet science is now in its full expansion, particularly after the CoRoT and Kepler space missions that led us to the discovery of thousands of extra-solar planets. The last decade has taught us that UV observations play a major role in…
Two groundbreaking new facilities will commence operations early in the 2020s and thereafter define much of the broad landscape of US optical-infrared astronomy in the remaining decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), perched…
Our understanding of the neutron star population is informed to a great degree by large-scale surveys that have been carried out by radio facilities during the past fifty years. We summarize some of the recent breakthroughs in our…
This article provides a brief overview of the Spitzer Space Telescope and discusses its initial scientific results on galactic and solar system science.