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The determination of photospheric abundances in late-type stars from spectroscopic observations is a well-established field, built on solid theoretical foundations. Improving those foundations to refine the accuracy of the inferred…
The days of the lone astronomer with his optical telescope and photographic plates are long gone: Astronomy in 2025 will not only be multi-wavelength, but multi-messenger, and dominated by huge data sets and matching data rates. Catalogues…
Today's most precise optical instruments -- gravitational-wave interferometers and optical atomic clocks -- rely on long storage times for photons to realize their exquisite sensitivity. Optical fiber technology is the most widely deployed…
Optical imaging with microarcsecond resolution will reveal details across and outside stellar surfaces but requires kilometer-scale interferometers, challenging to realize either on the ground or in space. Intensity interferometry,…
A photonic spectrograph can be much smaller than a conventional spectrograph with the same resolving power. Individual devices can be integrated with optical fibres to improve the multiplex gain in astronomical spectroscopy. Although…
We highlight recent theoretical and observational progress in several areas of neutron star astrophysics, and discuss the prospect for advances in the next decade.
Plans for the next generation of optical-infrared telescopes, the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs), are well advanced. With primary apertures in excess of 20m, they will revolutionise our ground-based capabilities. In this review I…
We call attention on the fact that recent unprecedented technological achievements, in particular in the field of quantum optics, seem to open the way to new experimental tests which might be relevant both for the foundational problems of…
During some thirty years, 1980-2010, technical studies of optical interferometry from instruments in space were pursued as promising for higher spatial resolution and for higher astrometric accuracy. Nulling interferometry was studied for…
Astronomy, as many other scientific disciplines, is facing a true data deluge which is bound to change both the praxis and the methodology of every day research work. The emerging field of astroinformatics, while on the one end appears…
The astronomical community is grappling with the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by modern telescopes, due to difficulties in reducing, accessing, analyzing, and combining archives of data. To address this challenge, we…
We give an overview of the current and future IFU capabilities on the Gemini 8-m telescopes. The telescopes are well-suited to integral field spectroscopy and both telescopes will have optical and near-infrared IFUs within the next few…
Cosmology with large interferometric telescopes is a rich and largely unexplored subject, involving three types of measurement: astrometric measurement of absolute distances and proper motions, dispersions of relative proper motions, and…
The power of robotic telescopes to transform science education has been voiced by multiple sources, since the 1980s. Since then, much technical progress has been made in robotic telescope provision to end users via a variety of different…
The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…
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…
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…
Research activities during the last decade have shown the strong potential of photonic devices to greatly simplify ground based and space borne astronomical instruments and to improve their performance. We focus specifically on the…
Adaptive optics (AO) instruments for the future extremely large telescopes (ELTs) are characterized by advanced optical systems with diffraction-limited optical quality. Low geometric distortion is also crucial for high accuracy astrometric…
We report the first use of Michelson interferometry on the Keck I telescope for diffraction-limited imaging in the near infrared JHK and L bands. By using an aperture mask located close to the f/25 secondary, the 10 m Keck primary mirror…