Related papers: Conference Summary: Mapping the Hidden Universe

During the second half of the twentieth century, expensive observatories are being erected at La Silla (Chile), Mauna Kea (Hawai), Las Palmas (Canary Island), and Calar Alto (Spain), to name a view. In 1990, at the beginning of The Decade…

The SKA is a unique instrument to open a window on many aspects of galaxy formation and evolution which can be examined in our Local Universe. Here I will focus on the outermost regions of galaxies which can be observed with sufficient…

This text is the write-up of a series of lectures on the asymptotic mixed Hodge theory of isolated hypersurface singularities, held at the Third Latin American school on Algebraic Geometry and its applications (ELGA 3) in Guanajuato,…

Surveys of the local and distant Universe are the means to test and improve our models of galaxy formation. Substantial successes in the models are evident, while there is also considerable recent progress in identifying what remains to be…

We describe the use of partially overlapping galaxies to provide direct measurements of the effective absorption in galaxy disks, independent of assumptions about internal disk structure. The non-overlapping parts of the galaxies and…

The Universe is inhomogeneous, and yet it seems to be incredibly well-characterised by a homogeneous relativistic model. One of the current challenges is to accurately characterise the properties of such a model. In this paper we explore…

Observations at high energies yield important information on the structure and nature of AGN; when coupled with deep optical and near-infrared (photometric and spectroscopic) follow-up, they provide constraints on the mass of the growing…

An overview of the ESO/Radionet workshop devoted to 3D optical/near-infrared and sub-mm/radio observations of gas and stars in galaxies is presented. There will be no published proceedings but presentations are available at…

The BeppoSAX 4.5-10 keV High Energy Large Area Survey has covered about 80 square degrees of sky down to a flux of F(5-10keV)~5E-14 cgs. Optical spectroscopic identification of about half of the sources in the sample (62) shows that many…

We present results from a new method of exploring the distant Universe. We use 3-D spectroscopy to sample a large cosmological volume at a time when the Universe was less than 3 billion years old to investigate the evolution of…

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…

These are lecture notes of a course held at IMPA, Rio de Janiero, in september 2010: the purpose was to present recent results on Kobayashi hyperbolicity in complex geometry. Our ultimate goal is to describe the results obtained on…

We give an overview of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), a NASA Explorer Mission launched on April 28, 2003. GALEX is performing the first space UV sky-survey, including imaging and grism surveys in two bands (1350-1750 Angstroms and…

The Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS) is among the first galaxy redshift surveys to sample a reasonably fair volume of the local Universe. On the largest scales (>> 100/h Mpc), the galaxy distribution appears smooth; on relatively small…

We review the results of HI line surveys of extragalactic sources in the local Universe. In the last two decades major efforts have been made in establishing on firm statistical grounds the properties of the HI source population, the two…

We provide a status report on our search for dark matter in our Galaxy in the form of massive compact halo objects (or Machos), using gravitational microlensing of background stars. This search uses a very large format CCD camera on the…

Hard X-ray, large area surveys are a fundamental complement of ultra-deep, pencil beam surveys in obtaining a more complete coverage of the L-z plane, allowing to find luminous QSO in wide z ranges. Furthermore, results from these surveys…

The MACHO Project is searching for galactic dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (Machos). Millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and Galactic bulge are photometrically…

The opacity of foreground spiral disks can be probed from the number of distant galaxies seen through them. To calibrate this number for effects other than the dust extinction, Gonzalez et al (1998) developed the "Synthetic Field Method". A…

This is the report of the Ultraviolet-Optical Working Group (UVOWG) commissioned by NASA to study the scientific rationale for new missions in ultraviolet/optical space astronomy approximately ten years from now, when the Hubble Space…