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The spatial distribution and lifetime of molecular gas in the inner regions of young circumstellar disks are key to understanding the formation of planetary systems. Gas-rich disks are observed to disperse in the first ~10 Myr, and recent…
A review of modernization and growth of ground based optical and near-infrared astrophysical observational facilities in the globe attributed to the recent technological developments in optomechanical, electronics and computer science areas…
An important evolutionary pathway for planetary atmospheres is escape to space, which has been studied on Earth and Mars for several decades and more recently in exoplanets. A particularly important regime is the hydrodynamic escape,…
Recent improvements in astronomical observations lead to the conclusion that the Hubble constant lies between 60 and 80 Mpc km$^{-1}$ sec$^{-1}$ and the age of the universe between 11 and 14 Gigayears. Taken together with recent…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the…
The Hubble constant value is currently known to 10% accuracy unless assumptions are made for the cosmology (Sandage et al. 2006). Gravitational lens systems provide another probe of the Hubble constant using time delay measurements.…
Despite the tremendous advance of observational cosmology, the value of the Hubble constant ($H_0$) is still controversial (the so called ``Hubble tension'') because of the inconsistency between local/late-time measurements and those…
The China Space Station Telescope (CSST) will enter a low Earth orbit around 2024 and operate for 10 years, with seven of those years devoted to surveying the area of the median-to-high Galactic latitude and median-to-high Ecliptic latitude…
Hubble Space Telescope photometry of $\eta$ Carinae spans 23 years, including five spectroscopic events. The rapid brightening rate decreased after 2010, and the spectroscopic events in 2014 and 2020 had light curves different from their…
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…
In spite of great progress over the last $\sim 10$ years, especially thanks to HST, a number of exciting open problem still puzzle astronomers working on globular clusters in our own and other galaxies. These problems range from determining…
We update a physically-motivated model of radiation damage in the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys/Wide Field Channel, using data up to mid 2010. We find that Charge Transfer Inefficiency increased dramatically before…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) can advance scientific frontiers beyond its groundbreaking 10-year survey. Here we explore opportunities for extended operations with proposal-based observing strategies, new filters, or…
Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be a key facility for small body science in planetary astronomy over the next decade. It will carry out the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), observing the sky repeatedly in u, g, r, i, z, and y over the…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been operational for over 30 years and throughout that time it has been bombarded by high energy charged particles colloquially referred to as cosmic rays. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study…
We report on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of three Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), discovered in our dedicated ground-based search campaign, that are candidates for long-range observations from the New Horizons spacecraft: 2011…
The Astro2020 Decadal Survey recognizes time-domain astronomy as a key science area over the next decade and beyond. With over 30 years of HST data and the potential for 20 years of JWST operations, these flagship observatories offer an…
For 100 years since galaxies were found to be flying apart from each other, astronomers have been trying to determine how fast. The expansion, characterized by the Hubble constant, H0, is confused locally by peculiar velocities caused by…
Thanks to its unprecedented spatial resolution, the Hubble Space Telescope has ended a 20-year long stalemate by detecting the dynamical signature of nuclear supermassive black holes (SBHs) in a sizeable number of nearby galaxies. These…