Related papers: A New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching Interferometry…
Astro-COLIBRI is an innovative tool designed for professional astronomers to facilitate the study of transient astronomical events. Transient events - such as supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and stellar mergers - are fleeting cataclysmic…
High spatial resolution is the key for the understanding various astrophysical phenomena. But even with the future E-ELT, single dish instruments are limited to a spatial resolution of about 4 mas in the visible. For the closest objects…
We have developed a Java-based teaching tool, "Appreciating Hubble at Hyper-speed" ($\textit{AHaH}$), intended for use by students and instructors in beginning astronomy and cosmology courses, which we have made available online. This tool…
The exquisite precision delivered by interferometric techniques is rapidly being applied to more and more branches of optical astronomy. One particularly successful strategy to obtain structures at the scale of the diffraction limit is…
After a decade of great progress in understanding gas flow into, out of, and through the Milky Way, we are poised to merge observations with simulations to build a comprehensive picture of the multi-scale magnetized interstellar medium…
General-education college astronomy courses offer instructors both a unique audience and a unique challenge. For many students, such a course may be their first time encountering a standalone astronomy class, and it is also likely one of…
The dynamics of apparent and event horizons of various black hole spacetimes, including those containing distorted, rotating and colliding black holes, are studied. We have developed a powerful and efficient new method for locating the…
The ultimate astronomical observatory would be a formation flying interferometer in space, immune to atmospheric turbulence and absorption, free from atmospheric and telescope thermal emission, and reconfigurable to adjust baselines…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has significantly advanced our ability to study black holes, achieving unprecedented spatial resolution and revealing horizon-scale structures. Notably, these observations feature a distinctive dark…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
In recent decades, astronomy and astrophysics have experienced several fundamental changes. On one hand, there has been a significant increase in the observation of transient phenomena, which are short-lived events such as supernova…
Astrometry -- the precise measurement of positions and motions of celestial objects -- has emerged as a promising avenue for characterizing the dark matter population in our Galaxy. By leveraging recent advances in simulation-based…
Holography as a subject is neglected largely in current physics lessons and in school books. Even though this topic might be complex, it is applicable and viable in the world that we live in. Holography lends itself to further develop…
A measurement of the cosmological 21 cm signal remains a promising but as-of-yet unattained ambition of radio astronomy. A positive detection would provide direct observations of key unexplored epochs of our cosmic history, including the…
We tested the effectiveness on learning of hands-on, night-time laboratories that challenged student misconceptions in a non-major introductory astronomy class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We present a new assessment examination…
Gamma-ray observations give us a direct view into the most extreme environments of the universe. They help us to study astronomical particle accelerators as supernovae remnants, pulsars, active galaxies or gamma-ray bursts and help us to…
Cultural Astronomy sits at the intersection of our study of the universe and the human experience, exploring how we observe the stars, interpret their motions, and incorporate them into our perspectives of the nature of reality. "Astronomy…
Radio astronomy began with one array (Jansky's) and one paraboloid of revolution (Reber's) as collecting areas and has now reached the point where a large number of facilities are arrays of paraboloids, each of which would have looked…
This writeup is an introduction to neutrino astronomy, addressed to astronomers and written by astroparticle physicists. While the focus is on achievements and goals in neutrino astronomy, rather than on the aspects connected to particle…
Gravitational wave observations will be excellent tools for making precise measurements of processes that occur in very strong-field regions of spacetime. Extreme mass ratio systems, formed by the capture of a stellar mass body compact by a…