Related papers: Large Radio Astronomy: next 70 Years Step
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…
Large sensor-based infrastructures for radio astronomy will be among the most intensive data-driven projects in the world, facing very high power demands. The geographically wide distribution of these infrastructures and their associated…
As the panel on Planetary Systems and Star Formation (PSF) is fully aware, the next decade will see major advances in our understanding of these areas of research. To quote from their charge, these advances will occur in studies of solar…
Remarkable progress has been made in understanding turbulent astrophysical plasmas in past decades including, notably, the solar wind and the interstellar medium. In the case of the solar wind, much of this progress has relied on in situ…
While both society and astronomy have evolved greatly over the past fifty years, the academic institutions and incentives that shape our field have remained largely stagnant. As a result, the astronomical community is faced with several…
At the turn of the decade we arguably move from the era of precision cosmology to the era of galaxy formation. One approach to this problem will be via the construction of comprehensive galaxy samples. In this review I take the opportunity…
Our current sampling of the near-Earth space environment is wholly insufficient to measure the highly variable processes therein and make predictions on par with lower atmospheric weather. We sketch out the scientific rationale for a…
As the amount of information to be transmitted from deep-space rapidly increases, the radiofrequency technology has become a bottleneck in space communications. RF is already limiting the scientific outcome of deep-space missions and could…
Science opportunities and recommendations concerning optical/infrared polarimetry for the upcoming decade in the fields of planetary systems and star formation. Community-based White Paper to Astro2010 in response to the call for such…
Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…
Radio wavelengths offer the unique possibility of tracing the total star-formation rate in galaxies, both obscured and unobscured. As such, they may provide the most robust measurement of the star-formation history of the Universe. In this…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be a transformative experiment for gravitational wave astronomy, and, as such, it will offer unique opportunities to address many key astrophysical questions in a completely novel way. The…
Many scientific deliverables of the next generation low frequency radio telescopes require high dynamic range imaging. Next generation telescopes under construction indeed promise at least a ten-fold increase in the sensitivity compared…
Large astronomical instruments using tens to hundreds of optical or infrared science detectors pose specific challenges for detector control, where, in addition to performance, other engineering aspects like scalability, power consumption,…
Digital radio detection of cosmic rays has made tremendous progress over the past decade. It has become increasingly clear where the potential --- but also the limitations --- of the technique lie. In this article, we discuss roads that…
I review selected current observations of distant galaxies and our interpretation of the fragile (and occasionally contradictory) data. Galaxies at the ``contemporary limit'' of technology and redshift (z~6) are difficult to locate in the…
During the next decade a tremendous advance will take place in instrumentation for spectroscopy of the interstellar medium. Major new facilities (ALMA, SOFIA, APEX, LMT, Herschel and others) will be constructed and commissioned, so that the…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
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…
Observations at radio wavelengths address key problems in astrophysics, astrobiology, and lunar structure including the first light in the Universe (the Epoch of Reionization), the presence of magnetic fields around extrasolar planets,…