Related papers: FIRST Extra-Galactic Surveys: Practical Considerat…
The proposed infrared space interferometry mission Darwin has two main aims: (i) to detect and characterize exo-planets similar to the Earth, and (ii) to carry out astrophysical imaging in the wavelength range 6 - 20 micron at a sensitivity…
Astrophysical measurements away from the 1 AU orbit of Earth can enable several astrophysical science cases that are challenging or impossible to perform from Earthbound platforms, including: building a detailed understanding of the…
Gravitational lensing (GL) of distant radio sources by galaxy clusters should produce radio arc(let)s. We extracted radio sources from the FIRST survey near Abell cluster cores and found their radio position angles to be uniformly…
The importance of multiwavelength astronomical surveys is discussed in the context of galaxy evolution. The AKARI Deep Field South (ADF-S) is a new, well placed survey field that is already the subject of studies at a wide range of…
The Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a NASA space mission in study for launch in 2024. It has a 2.4 m telescope, wide-field IR instrument operating in the 0.7 - 2.0 micron range and an exoplanet imaging coronagraph…
In this study, we explore and review the scientific potential for exoplanet characterization by a high-contrast optical coronagraph on WFIRST/AFTA. We suggest that the heterogeneity in albedo spectra and planet/star flux ratios as a…
(Abridged)One of the fundamental challenges for astrophysics in the 21st century is finding a way to untangle the physical processes that govern galaxy formation and evolution. Given the importance and scope of this problem, the…
Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space…
The origin of astrophysical magnetic fields observed in galaxies and clusters of galaxies is still unclear. One possibility is that primordial magnetic fields generated in the early Universe provide seeds that grow through compression and…
I briefly mention a few possible applications of very high spectral resolution spectroscopy with CRIRES to the study of nearby galaxies. This includes the fields of AGN, dynamically cold systems, super stellar and emission line clusters,…
We investigate the possibility of using future photometric and radio surveys to constrain the power spectrum of primordial fluctuations that is predicted by inflationary models with a violation of the slow-roll phase. We forecast…
We present a statistical method based on a maximum likelihood approach to constrain the number counts of extragalactic sources below the nominal flux-density limit of continuum imaging surveys. We extract flux densities from a radio map…
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…
Fluctuations in the brightness of the background radiation can lead to confusion with real point sources. Such background emission confusion will be important for infrared observations with relatively large beam sizes since the amount of…
An important requirement for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is to carry out precision astrometry in crowded fields. This capability is crucial, for example, to accurately measure proper motions of bright stars in nearby galaxies.…
IRAC excels at detecting distant objects. Due to a combination of the shapes of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and the low background achieved from space, IRAC reaches greater depth in comparable exposure time at 3.6 and 4.5…
The exhilerating results from Swift in its first year of operations have opened a new era of exploration of the high energy universe. The surge to higher redshifts of the Gamma-ray bursts now imaged with increased sensitivity establishes…
Future direct imaging missions such as HabEx and LUVOIR aim to catalog and characterize Earth-mass analogs around nearby stars. The exoplanet yield of these missions will be dependent on the frequency of Earth-like planets, and potentially…
The most obvious extragalactic targets for optical/infrared interferometers are Active Galactic Nuclei. In this document, I try to overview other topics that could be of interest to studies of galaxies and whether they could be adequate for…
The SIRTF Nearby Galaxy Survey is a comprehensive infrared imaging and spectroscopic survey of 75 nearby galaxies. Its primary goal is to characterize the infrared emission of galaxies and their principal infrared-emitting components,…