Related papers: Scheduling Discovery in the 2020s
Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
The next decade affords tremendous opportunity to achieve the goals of Galactic archaeology. That is, to reconstruct the evolutionary narrative of the Milky Way, based on the empirical data that describes its current morphological,…
As the next decade approaches, it is once again time for the US astronomical community to assess its investment priorities for the coming decade on the ground and in space. This report, created to aid NOAO in its planning for the 2020…
The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…
Astronomy, as many other scientific disciplines, is facing a true data deluge which is bound to change both the praxis and the methodology of every day research work. The emerging field of astroinformatics, while on the one end appears…
The astronomical community is grappling with the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by modern telescopes, due to difficulties in reducing, accessing, analyzing, and combining archives of data. To address this challenge, we…
Observatories are complex scientific and technical institutions serving diverse users and purposes. Their telescopes, instruments, software, and human resources engage in interwoven workflows over a broad range of timescales. These…
The principle that research output should be open has, in recent years, been in-creasingly applied to data and software. Licensing is a key aspect to openness. Navi-gating the landscape of open source licenses can lead to complex…
As observational datasets become larger and more complex, so too are the questions being asked of these data. Data simulations, i.e., synthetic data with properties (pixelization, noise, PSF, artifacts, etc.) akin to real data, are…
Time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics are growing and important modes of observational astronomy that will help define astrophysics in the 2020s. Significant effort is being put into developing the components of a follow-up system…
The tightest and most robust cosmological results of the next decade will be achieved by bringing together multiple surveys of the Universe. This endeavor has to happen across multiple layers of the data processing and analysis, e.g.,…
The importance of archival science increases significantly for astrophysical observatories as they mature and their archive holdings grow in size and complexity. Further enhancing the science return of archival data requires engaging a…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
We write in response to the call from the 2020 Decadal Survey to submit white papers illustrating the most pressing scientific questions in astrophysics for the coming decade. We propose exploration as the central question for the Decadal…
Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
We argue that it is essential that the Astro2020 survey of the present state of American astronomy and the recommendations for the next decade address the issue of ensuring preservation of, and making more discoverable and accessible, the…
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data…
The field of astronomy has arrived at a turning point in terms of size and complexity of both datasets and scientific collaboration. Commensurately, algorithms and statistical models have begun to adapt --- e.g., via the onset of artificial…