Related papers: Hidden BL Lacertae Objects Near and Far
We report on 16 BL Lacertae objects that were proposed to be at z > 1. We present spectroscopic observations secured at the 10.4m GTC that allowed us to assess the redshift of these sources. In particular, for five objects we disprove the…
Understanding the galaxy in which we live is one of the great intellectual challenges facing modern science. With the advent of high quality observational data, the chemical evolution modeling of our galaxy has been the subject of numerous…
Despite much recent theoretical and observational progress in our knowledge of the early universe, many fundamental questions remain only partially answered. Here, we review the latest achievements and persisting problems in the…
There are strong phenomenological arguments favoring the existence of vector-like leptons and quarks in nature. In spite of extensive studies conducted in search of vector-like quarks, there are only a limited number of experimental studies…
Over the last half-century quantitative stellar spectroscopy has made great progress. However, most stellar abundance analyses today still employ rather simplified models, which can introduce severe systematic errors swamping the…
Data taken in stereo mode by the High Resolution Fly's Eye (HiRes) air fluorescence experiment are analyzed to search for correlations between the arrival directions of ultra--high-energy cosmic rays with the positions of BL Lacertae…
What are the important unanswered questions in cosmology? The choice as to which are the most important is somewhat personal. In the view of the author, the ten topics chosen here for discussion must be included among the most fundamental.…
The theory of stellar evolution plays a central role in astrophysics as stellar models are used to infer properties for Galactic and Extragalactic stellar populations as well as exoplanetary systems. However, despite decades of experience,…
In spite of the great effort made in the last decades to improve our understanding of stellar evolution, significant uncertainties still remain due to our poor knowledge of some complex physical processes that still require an empirical…
Galaxies represent the visible fabric of the Universe and there has been considerable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies. The underlying goal is to understand the present-day diversity of galaxy forms, masses…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
An important goal of helio- and asteroseismology is to improve the modelling of stellar evolution. Here I provide a brief discussion of some of the uncertain issues in stellar modelling, of possible relevance to asteroseismic inferences.
I critically review a methodology of using clusters of galaxies as cosmological probes. The understanding of the abundances and spatial correlations of dark matter halos has been significantly advanced especially for a last few years.…
Over the last decades, observations with increasing quality have revolutionized our understanding of the general properties of the Universe. Questions posed for millenia by mankind about the origin, evolution and structure of the cosmos…
We review the theory of electron-conduction opacity, a fundamental ingredient in the computation of low-mass stellar models; shortcomings and limitations of the existing calculations used in stellar evolution are discussed. We then present…
We study a fundamental issue in cosmology: Whether we can rely on a cosmological model to understand the real history of the Universe. This fundamental, still unresolved issue is often called the ``model-fitting problem (or averaging…
The success of present and future cosmological studies is tied to the ability to detect discrepancies in complex data sets within the framework of a cosmological model. Tensions caused by the presence of unknown systematic effects need to…
The uncertainties which still plague our understanding of the evolution of the light nuclides D, 3He and 4He in the Galaxy are described. Measurements of the local abundance of deuterium range over a factor of 3. The observed dispersion can…
Despite two decades of tremendous experimental and theoretical progress, the riddle of the accelerated expansion of the Universe remains to be solved. On the experimental side, our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the…
The last decade has seen apparent dramatic progress in large spectroscopic datasets aimed at the study of the Galactic bulge. We consider remaining problems that appear to be intractable with the existing data, including important issues…