Related papers: The Local Interstellar Medium
Time-resolved ground-based surveys in general, and photometric ones in particular, have played a crucial role in building up our knowledge of the properties, physical nature, and the very existence of the many different classes of variable…
Observational cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation. The transition to precision cosmology…
Long range observations in the field of astronomy have opened up our understanding of the Solar System, the Galaxy and the wider Universe. In this paper we discuss the idea of direct in-situ reconnaissance of nearby stellar systems, using…
Interstellar matter (ISM) sets the boundary conditions of the heliosphere and dominates the interplanetary medium. The heliosphere configuration has varied over recent history, as the Sun emerged from the Local Bubble and entered a…
The aim of this article is to demonstrate the useful role that can be played by spectropolarimetric observations of young and evolved emission line stars that analyse the linearly polarized component in their spectra. At the time of…
Star-forming regions have been the targets of X-ray observations since the dawn of satellite X-ray astronomy. The increase in sensitivity and/or spatial resolution offered by XMM-Newton and Chandra allows a dramatic improvement, both…
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…
For many decades the determination of accurate fundamental parameters for stars (masses, radii, temperatures, luminosities, etc.) has mostly been the domain of eclipsing binary systems. That has begun to change as long-baseline…
We present a preliminary view of the protostellar mass-luminosity relation using current samples of protostars with dynamical mass estimates. To provide a lower limit to the expected luminosities, we adopt an empirical estimate for the…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it is an important component of the interstellar medium and plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies, the formation of stars and…
We present an improved model for the absorption of X-rays in the ISM intended for use with data from future X-ray missions with larger effective areas and increased energy resolution such as Chandra and XMM, in the energy range above 100eV.…
Obtaining a complete census of gas in the local interstellar medium (<100 pc) is challenging given the limited available tracers of the warm, partially-ionized medium. Medium-to-high resolution UV absorption spectroscopy toward individual…
I have used the Hipparcos Input Catalog, together with Kurucz model stellar atmospheres, and information on the strength of the interstellar extinction, to create a model of the expected intensity and spectral distribution of the local…
This paper reviews the theoretical approaches and existing models of the solar wind interaction with the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC). Models discussed take into account the multi-component nature of the solar wind and local interstellar…
The interstellar medium is the engine room for galactic evolution. While much is known about the conditions within the ISM, many important areas regarding the formation and evolution of the various phases of the ISM leading to star…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
Aims: We offer a new, simpler picture of the local interstellar medium, made of a single continuous cloud enveloping the Sun. This new outlook enables the description of a diffuse cloud from within and brings to light some unexpected…
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…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…