Related papers: Saving Astronomical Treasures
We explore how astronomers take observational data from telescopes, process them into usable scientific data products, curate them for later use, and reuse data for further inquiry. Astronomers have invested heavily in knowledge…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
I review some of the past and current methods for retrieval of literature and other published information, excluding commercial services. Much of this is a personal view and based on experience made at various institutions, some of them…
Modern soft X-ray observatories can yield unique insights into time domain astrophysics, and a huge amount of information is stored - and largely unexploited - in data archives. Like a treasure-hunt, the EXTraS project harvested the…
For generations, people have complained that things used to be better in the past. In this paper, we investigate this change by specifically looking at creativity in astronomy. To do this,we explore if older constellations reflected a…
Time domain astronomy has come of age with astronomers now able to monitor the sky at high cadence both across the electromagnetic spectrum and using neutrinos and gravitational waves. The advent of new observing facilities permits new…
Due to its location and climate, Antarctica offers unique conditions for long-period observations across a broad wavelength regime, where important diagnostic lines for molecules and ions can be found, that are essential to understand the…
The determination of chemical abundances from stellar spectra is considered a mature field of astrophysics. Digital spectra of stars are recorded and processed with standard techniques, much like samples in the biological sciences.…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…
The National Academy Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science (CAPS) made a recommendation to study a large/medium-class dedicated space telescope for planetary science, going beyond the Discovery-class dedicated planetary space…
All sciences, including astronomy, are now entering the era of information abundance. The exponentially increasing volume and complexity of modern data sets promises to transform the scientific practice, but also poses a number of common…
The age of an individual star cannot be measured, only estimated through mostly model-dependent or empirical methods, and no single method works well for a broad range of stellar types or for a full range in age. This review presents a…
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…
Astrophotonics lies at the interface of astronomy and photonics. This burgeoning field -- now formally recognized by the optics community -- has emerged over the past decade in response to the increasing demands of astronomical…
We present a World-Wide-Web-accessible database of astronomical images which suffer from a variety of observational problems, ranging from common occurences, such as dust grains on filters and/or the dewar window, to more exotic phenomena,…
The last few years have seen gamma-ray astronomy maturing and advancing in the field of time-domain astronomy, utilizing source variability on timescales over many orders of magnitudes, from a decade down to a few minutes and shorter,…
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online…
Recent X-ray observations have had a major impact on topics ranging from protostars to cosmology. They have also drawn attention to important and general physical processes that currently limit our understanding of thermal and nonthermal…
Abridged: The golden age of astrophysics is upon us with both grand discoveries (extra-solar planets, dark matter, dark energy) and precision cosmology. Fundamental understanding of the working of stars and galaxies is within reach, thanks…
M31, our closest neighboring galaxy, is a stepping stone to studies of stellar evolution, star formation, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. However, due to the difficulties of performing photometry in such crowded fields and the lack of wide…