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Simulations of galaxy evolution aim to capture our current understanding as well as to make predictions for testing by future experiments. Simulations and observations are often compared in an indirect fashion: physical quantities are…

High-energy cosmic rays, impinging on the atmosphere of the Earth initiate cascades of secondary particles, the extensive air showers. The electrons and positrons in the air shower emit electromagnetic radiation. This emission is detected…

Information about the make-up of the galaxy arrives in the Solar system in many forms: photons of different energies, classically collected by ground- and space-based telescopes, neutral and charged atomic particles, and solid macroscopic…

Nature is providing particles with energies exceeding 100 EeV. Their existence imposes immediate questions: Are they ordinary particles, accelerated in extreme astrophysical environments, or are they annihilation or decay products of…

We analyze findings of the Stardust mission that brought to the Earth dust from the 81P/Wild 2 coma. Just as the data of the Deep Impact mission to 9P/Tempel 1, they are at odds with the widely accepted condensation/sublimation comet…

Within 40 years of the detection of the first extrasolar X-ray source in 1962,NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has achieved an increase in sensitivity of 10 orders of magnitude, comparable to the gain in going from naked-eye observations to…

Research activities during the last decade have shown the strong potential of photonic devices to greatly simplify ground based and space borne astronomical instruments and to improve their performance. We focus specifically on the…

The Ulysses spacecraft, launched in October 1990, orbits the Sun on a polar trajectory. The spacecraft is equipped with a highly sensitive impact- ionization dust detector which can in situ measure cosmic dust grains in the mass range 10^-9…

In the past four decades a new type of astronomy has emerged, where instead of looking up into the sky "telescopes" are buried miles underground or deep under water or ice and search not for photons (that is, light), but rather for…

After a hundred years of searching for the origin of cosmic rays, where and how they are made has finally become clear. Here we briefly trace that odyssey through both astronomical observations and cosmic ray measurements.

The SXI telescope is one of the three instruments on board EXIST, a multiwavelength observatory in charge of performing a global survey of the sky in hard X-rays searching for Supermassive Black Holes. One of the primary objectives of EXIST…

Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…

Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing…

ATLAS (Astrophysics Telescope for Large Area Spectroscopy) Probe is a concept for a NASA probe-class space mission. It is the follow-up space mission to WFIRST, boosting its scientific return by obtaining deep IR slit spectroscopy for 70%…

The Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) is a NASA astronomy mission that will explore the 905-1187 A wavelength region at high spectral resolution. Funded by NASA's Explorer Program, this Origins mission is scheduled for a 1999…

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is an infrared observatory of novel design: deployable, with active optics, fully open to space for radiative cooling and orbiting the Lagrange point no. 2. This article explains the…

PILOT (the Pathfinder for an International Large Optical Telescope is a proposed 2.5 m optical/infrared telescope to be located at DomeC on the Antarctic plateau. The atmospheric conditions at Dome C deliver a high sensitivity, high…

Tracing the formation and evolution of all supermassive black holes, including the obscured ones, understanding how black holes influence their surroundings and how matter behaves under extreme conditions, are recognized as key science…

THESEUS, one of the two space mission concepts being studied by ESA as candidates for next M5 mission within its Comsic Vision programme, aims at fully exploiting Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) to solve key questions about the early Universe, as…

21 cm cosmology, the statistical observation of the high redshift universe using the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of cosmology and the astrophysical processes that underlie…