Related papers: Extremely large telescopes for complex stellar pop…
Strong gravitational lensing enables a wide range of science: probing cosmography; testing dark matter models; understanding galaxy evolution; and magnifying the faint, small and distant Universe. However to date exploiting strong lensing…
Recent observations supported by theoretical models have lead to the view that giant and supergiant stars are over abundant, and/or a high metallicity component may be present, in the stellar populations at the centres of active galaxies.…
As part of a stellar population sampling program, a series of photometric probes at various field sizes and depths have been obtained in a low extinction window in the galactic anticentre direction. Very deep CCD frames probe the most…
An introduction is given to projects investigating galaxy evolution quantitatively by spectroscopic observations of very distant galaxies that have weak apparent brightnesses and small sizes as it is feasible with 10m-class telescopes like…
I discuss how spectroscopy of extragalactic globular clusters provides a powerful probe of the formation history and mass distribution of galaxies. One critical area is spectroscopy of objects which have been identified as candidate young…
The Einstein Telescope (ET) is the future third generation gravitational wave detector consisting of three independent interferometers arranged in a triangular configuration, with the sensitivity large enough to be able to detect stellar…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will enable revolutionary studies of galaxies, dark matter, and black holes over cosmic time. The LSST Galaxies Science Collaboration has identified a host of preparatory research tasks required to…
Galaxies form and evolve in the context of their local and large-scale environments. Their baryonic content that we observe with imaging and spectroscopy is intimately connected to the properties of their dark matter halos, and to their…
We describe a real-time spectroscopic program to observe bright gravitational microlensing events toward the Galactic Bulge. The program is carried out using the NTT at ESO. We present the preliminary analysis of the microlensing events we…
Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…
The last decade has seen apparent dramatic progress in large spectroscopic datasets aimed at the study of the Galactic bulge. We consider remaining problems that appear to be intractable with the existing data, including important issues…
The spectrum emitted by the Broad Emission Line Regions of Active Galactic Nuclei can measure the luminosity of the central object and the chemical composition of the interstellar medium in a very young galaxy, and so constrain the…
High Time Resolution Astrophysics (HTRA) concerns itself with observations on short scales normally defined as being lower than the conventional read-out time of a CCD. As such it is concerned with condensed objects such as neutron stars,…
The long-awaited promise of studying high-redshift galaxies at long wavelengths has been partially eclipsed by progress at optical wavelengths, mostly because of the number of available pixels. It is nonetheless essential to study optically…
The extragalactic background light (EBL) is of fundamental importance both for understanding the entire process of galaxy evolution and for gamma-ray astronomy. However, the overall spectrum of the EBL between 0.1 and 1000 microns has never…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
Context: The number of known strong gravitational lenses is expected to grow substantially in the next few years. The statistical combination of large samples of lenses has the potential of providing strong constraints on the inner…
Dense star clusters are spectacular self-gravitating stellar systems in our Galaxy and across the Universe - in many respects. They populate disks and spheroids of galaxies as well as almost every galactic center. In massive elliptical…
The study of the extragalactic background light (EBL) is undergoing a renaissance. New results from very high energy experiments and deep space missions have broken the deadlock between the contradictory measurements in the optical and…
Recent work (Corradi et al. 2015, Jones et al. 2016) has shown that the phenomenon of extreme abundance discrepancies, where recombination line abundances exceed collisionally excited line abundances by factors of 10 or more, seem to be…