Related papers: The Galactic Extinction Horizon with Present and F…
This white paper discusses the current landscape and prospects for experiments sensitive to particle dark matter processes producing photons and cosmic rays. Much of the gamma-ray sky remains unexplored on a level of sensitivity that would…
Surveys of pulsating stars in the inner Galaxy have been very limited, but recent large-scale surveys are rapidly bringing us new samples of various kinds of variable stars and new insights into stellar populations therein. Because of the…
We present new three-dimensional (3D) interstellar extinction maps in the $V$ and Gaia $G$ filters within 2 kpc of the Sun, a 3D differential extinction (dust spatial distribution density) map along the lines of sight in the same space, a…
These are advanced lecture notes covering recent developments in the methodology used to analyse galaxy surveys. The focus is particularly on direct measurements of the galaxy power spectrum although I also discuss its Fourier transform,…
Looking ahead to the next decade and imagining the landscape of astronomy in 2020, it is clear that astronomical surveys, large and small, plus extensive follow-up projects, will be a great engine of progress in our profession. Surveys have…
Despite mounting evidence that dark matter (DM) exists in the Universe, its fundamental nature remains unknown. We present sensitivity estimates to detect DM particles with a future very-high-energy ($\gtrsim$ TeV) wide field-of-view…
In the next 30 years, a new generation of space and ground-based telescopes will permit to obtain multi-frequency observations of faint sources and, for the first time in human history, to achieve a deep, almost synoptical monitoring of the…
I review the basic properties of interstellar extinction in the Milky Way galaxy, focusing primarily on the wavelength dependence within the IR through UV spectral region. My primary goal is to review the evidence supporting the idea that…
Until recently our knowledge of the Galactic Bulge stellar populations was based on the study of a few low extinction windows. Large photometric and spectroscopic surveys are now underway to map large areas of the bulge. They probe several…
One of the most striking features in galaxy redshift surveys is the ubiquitous presence of voids. However, voids have not been extensively studied due to observational limitations. Until recently, galaxy redshift surveys included only a few…
Windows of low extinction in the Milky Way (MW) have been used along the past decades for the study of the Galactic structure and the stellar population across the inner bulge and disk. Here we report the analysis of another low extinction…
VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) is an ESO public near-infrared variability survey of the Galactic bulge and an adjacent area of the southern mid-plane. It will produce a deep atlas in the ZYJHKs filters, and a Ks-band time-series…
The diffuse gamma ray emission from astrophysical backgrounds in our Galaxy and the signal due to the annihilation or decay of Dark Matter (DM) in the Galactic Halo are expected to have a substantially different morphology and spectral…
The last decade has seen enormous progress in understanding the structure of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies via the production of large-scale digital surveys of the sky like 2MASS and SDSS, as well as specialized, counterpart…
The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) has performed the first surveys of the sky in the Ultraviolet (UV). Its legacy is an unprecedented database with more than 200 million source measurements in far-UV (FUV) and near-UV (NUV), as well as…
Interstellar extinction towards the Galactic Center is large and significantly differential. Its reddening and dimming effects in red clump stars in the Galactic Bulge can be exploited to better constrain the extinction law towards the…
The detailed study of the Galactic bulge stellar population necessarily requires an accurate representation of the interstellar extinction particularly toward the Galactic plane and center, where the severe and differential reddening is…
Extragalactic X-ray surveys are exceptionally powerful tools for studying the evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, by detecting large numbers of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and star-forming galaxies over a wide…
(Abridged) Cosmology faces three distinct challenges in the next decade. (1) The dark sector, both dark matter and dark energy, dominates the Universe. Key questions include determining the nature of both. Improved observational probes are…
I describe some of the current challenges in galaxy formation theory with applications to formation of disks and of spheroids. Forthcoming deep surveys of galaxies with Keck and VLT will provide high quality spectra of $\sim 10^5$ galaxies…