Related papers: WFIRST: Enhancing Transient Science and Multi-Mess…
The recent detections of the afterglow phase of long gamma-ray bursts (lGRBs) at very high energies (VHE, >100 GeV) mark a significant advance in astrophysics of transient phenomena, offering deeper insights into the acceleration…
Astrophysical observations of the cosmos allow us to probe extreme physics and answer foundational questions on our universe. Modern astronomy is increasingly operating under a holistic approach, probing the same question with multiple…
The Wide-Field InfraRed Space Telescope (WFIRST) will be capable of delivering precise astrometry for faint sources over the enormous field of view of its main camera, the Wide-Field Imager (WFI). This unprecedented combination will be…
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will answer fundamental questions about the evolution of dark energy over time and expand the catalog of known exoplanets into new regions of parameter space. Using a Hubble-sized mirror and…
Transient astronomy in the early Universe (z > 2) remains largely unexplored, lying beyond the rest-frame optical spectroscopic reach of most current observatories. Yet this regime promises transformative insights, with high-redshift…
Astronomical transients are stellar objects that become temporarily brighter on various timescales and have led to some of the most significant discoveries in cosmology and astronomy. Some of these transients are the explosive deaths of…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will open a discovery frontier for faint and fast transients with its ability to detect variable flux components down to $\sim$24.5 mag in a $\sim$30 second exposure. Spectroscopic follow-up of…
We present a community-led assessment of the solar system investigations achievable with NASA's next-generation space telescope, the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST will provide imaging, spectroscopic, and…
From near-Earth asteroids to superluminous supernovae and counterparts to gravitational wave sources, the Zwicky Transient Facility will soon scan the night sky for transient phenomena.
The Large Area Telescope on the Fermi gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST, ex-GLAST) provides unprecedented sensitivity for all-sky monitoring of gamma-ray activity. It is an adequate telescope to detect transient sources, since the observatory…
We identify minimal observing cadence requirements that enable photometric astronomical surveys to detect and recognize fast and explosive transients and fast transient features. Observations in two different filters within a short time…
Ultra Fast Astronomy is a new frontier becoming enabled by improved detector technology allowing discovery of optical transients on millisecond to nanosecond time scales. These may reveal counterparts of energetic processes such as fast…
Relativistic transients such as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), jetted tidal disruption events, luminous fast blue optical transients, and fast X-ray transients, represent the brightest explosions in the Universe and serve dual roles as…
Cosmic acceleration is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. Testing and distinguishing among possible explanations requires cosmological measurements of extremely high precision probing the full history of cosmic…
The first decade of the new millenium should see the first direct detections of gravitational waves. This will be a milestone for fundamental physics and it will open the new observational science of gravitational wave astronomy. But…
We are at the dawn of a new golden age for radio astronomy, with a new generation of facilities under construction and the global community focussed on the Square Kilometre Array as its goal for the next decade. These new facilities offer…
Interferometric detectors will very soon give us an unprecedented view of the gravitational-wave sky, and in particular of the explosive and transient Universe. Now is the time to challenge our theoretical understanding of short-duration…
The ESA cornerstone mission The Far-Infrared and Submillimetre Sapce Telescope (FIRST) has the ideal combination of sensitivity and angular resolving power to determine the bright counts of galaxies over a large area of sky in the…
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a public-private enterprise, is a new time domain survey employing a dedicated camera on the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope with a 47 deg$^2$ field of view and 8 second readout time. It is well…
Thousands of active artificial objects are orbiting around Earth along with much more non-operational ones -- derelict satellites or rocket bodies, collision debris, or spacecraft payloads, significant part of them being uncatalogued. They…