Related papers: WFIRST: Enhancing Transient Science and Multi-Mess…

The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years…

The study of astronomical transients at high energies provides insights into some of the most extreme physical events in the universe; however, carrying out their detection and fast follow-up studies are limited by instrumental constraints.…

This report describes the 2014 study by the Science Definition Team (SDT) of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission. It is a space observatory that will address the most compelling scientific problems in dark energy,…

Optical microlensing surveys are restricted from detecting events near the Galactic plane and center, where the event rate is thought to be the highest, due to the high optical extinction of these fields. In the near-infrared (NIR),…

The nascent field of gravitational-wave astronomy offers many opportunities for effective and inspirational astronomy outreach. Gravitational waves, the "ripples in space-time" predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity, are…

Studies of the distant Universe are providing key insights into our understanding of the formation of galaxies. The advent of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has significantly enhanced our observational capabilities, leading to an…

Observations at far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths promise to revolutionize the study of high redshift galaxies and AGN by providing a unique probe of the conditions within heavily extinguished regions of star formation and nuclear…

The unique capabilities of Swift that make it ideal for discovery and follow-up of Gamma-Ray bursts also makes it the idea mission for discovery and monitoring of X-ray Transients in the Milky Way and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.…

Ongoing microlensing surveys have already yielded more than five hundred microlensing events, most of which have been identified in real-time. In this review I present the basic theory and observational status of these surveys. I highlight…

WFIRST microlensing observations will return high-precision parallaxes, sigma(pi) < 0.3 microarcsec, for the roughly 1 million stars with H<14 in its 2.8 deg^2 field toward the Galactic bulge. Combined with its 40,000 epochs of high…

Fast cosmological transients such as fast radio bursts (FRBs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) represent a class of sources more compact than any other cosmological object. As such they are sensitive to significant magnification via…

Half of the energy ever emitted by stars and accreting objects comes to us in the FIR waveband and has yet to be properly explored. We propose a powerful Far-InfraRed Interferometer mission, FIRI, to carry out high-resolution imaging…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is challenging our understanding of the nature of the very first galaxies in the Universe, having discovered a surprising abundance of very massive galaxies in early cosmic epochs. By applying a model…

How often do bright optical transients occur on the sky but go unreported? To constrain the bright end of the astronomical transient function, a systematic search for transients that become bright enough to be noticed by the unaided eye was…

Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high…

Large modern surveys require efficient review of data in order to find transient sources such as supernovae, and to distinguish such sources from artefacts and noise. Much effort has been put into the development of automatic algorithms,…

To determine the epoch of reionization precisely and to reveal the property of inhomogeneous reionization are some of the most important topics of modern cosmology. Existing methods to investigate reionization which use cosmic microwave…

Understanding and quantifying the contribution of known classes of transient and variable sources is an important lesson to be learned from the manifold of pre-cursors programs of the near-future large synoptic sky survey programs like…

I present an overview of the Swift mission, which was launched on November 20, 2004 to discover and observe the most energetic of astrophysical phenomena, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). After almost 6 years in space the Observatory is in…

Since the first detection of gravitational-wave (GW), GW150914, September 14th 2015, the multi-messenger astronomy added a new way of observing the Universe together with electromagnetic (EM) waves and neutrinos. After two years, GW…