Related papers: The limits of cosmology
This paper presents a review of the history, motivation and current status of high energy neutrino telescopes. Many years after these detectors were first conceived, the operation of kilometer-cubed scale detectors is finally on the horizon…
Scientific illustrations, thanks to the vision of great artists fascinated by astronomical research and astronautics, have provided us with an accurate depiction of the possible views which mankind will one day observed from locations other…
The Hubble Space Telescope has produced astonishing science over the past thirty years. Hubble's productivity can continue to soar for years to come provided some worn out components get upgraded. While powerful new ground-based and space…
This paper reports a design study for a space-based decametric wavelength telescope. While not a new concept, this design study focused on many of the operational aspects that would be required for an actual mission. This design optimized…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
The study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
Interferometry has brought many new constraints in optical astronomy in the recent years. A major leap in this field is the opening of large interferometric facilities like the Very Large Telescope Interferometer and the Keck Interferometer…
The proposed THESEUS mission will vastly expand the capabilities to monitor the high-energy sky, and will exploit large samples of gamma-ray bursts to probe the early Universe back to the first generation of stars, and to advance…
Galaxies are key objects for the study of cosmology, the life cycle of matter, and stellar evolution. X-ray observations have given us a new key window into these building blocks of the Universe, that allows us to investigate their hot…
The field of gamma-ray astronomy has experienced impressive progress over the last decade. Thanks to the advent of a new generation of imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, VERITAS) and thanks to the launch of the Fermi-LAT…
Radio pulsars have been responsible for many astonishing astrophysical and fundamental physics breakthroughs since their discovery 50 years ago. In this review I will discuss many of the highlights, most of which were only possible because…
The rapid cost growth of flagship space missions has created a crisis for astronomy and planetary science. We have hit the funding wall. For the past 3 decades scientists have not had to think much about how space technology would change…
Radio astronomy provides a unique window on the universe, allowing us to study: non-thermal processes (galactic nuclei, quasars, pulsars) at the highest angular resolution using VLBI, with low opacity. It is the most interesting wave band…
Full sky coverage with 30-40 meter-class telescopes is essential to answer fundamental questions in Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Physics, such as the composition of the Universe and the formation of the first stars and supermassive black…
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…
Due to ionosphere absorption and the interference by natural and artificial radio emissions, astronomical observation from the ground becomes very difficult at the wavelengths of decametre or longer, which we shall refer as the ultralong…
The Laser Interferometer Lunar Antenna (LILA) is a next-generation gravitational-wave (GW) facility on the Moon. By harnessing the Moon's unique environment, LILA fills a critical observational gap in the mid-band GW spectrum ($0.1 - 10$…
Lunar retro-reflector arrays (LRAs) consisting of corner-cube reflectors (CCRs) placed on the nearside of the Moon during the Apollo era have demonstrated their longevity, cost-effectiveness, ease of deployment, and most importantly their…
The flat matter dominated Universe that dominated cosmological model building for much of the past 20 years does not correspond to the Universe in which we live. This has profound implications both for our understanding of dark matter, and…