Related papers: The Local Interstellar Medium
Substantial progress has been achieved over the last decade in studies of stellar magnetism due to the improvement of magnetic field measurement methods. We review recent results on the magnetic field characteristics of early B- and O-type…
The new generation of ground-based, large-aperture solar telescopes promises to significantly increase our capabilities to understand the many basic phenomena taking place in the Sun at all atmospheric layers and how they relate to each…
The properties of interstellar clouds near the Sun are ordered by the Loop I superbubble and by the interstellar radiation field. Comparisons of the kinematics and magnetic field of the interstellar gas flowing past the Sun, including the…
The study of the interstellar medium (ISM) in the X-rays has entered a golden age with the advent of the X-ray observatories XMM-Newton and Chandra. High-energy resolution allowed to study dust spectroscopic features with unprecedented…
In this review, our present day understanding of the Sun's global photospheric and coronal magnetic fields is discussed from both observational and theoretical viewpoints. Firstly, the large-scale properties of photospheric magnetic fields…
The X-ray regime is a largely underused resource for constraining interstellar dust grain models and improving our understanding of the physical processes that dictate how grains evolve over their lifetimes. This is mostly due to current…
The large surveys and sensitive instruments of modern astronomy are turning ever more examples of variable objects, many of which are extending the parameter space to testing theories of stellar evolution and accretion. Future projects such…
We summarize some of the compelling new scientific opportunities for understanding stars and stellar systems that can be enabled by sub-milliarcsec (sub-mas) angular resolution, UV-Optical spectral imaging observations, which can reveal the…
So far, high resolution techniques on the one hand provide morphological information on bright nearby objects. On the other hand, telescopes with large collecting areas allow us to detect very faint and distant objects, but not to obtain a…
Recent progress in our knowledge of stellar populations in local dwarf spheroidal galaxies is briefly discussed. A few results are summarized including wide field observations of stellar populations and their spatial variations, studies of…
We present results of an ongoing survey of low surface brightness planetary nebulae (PNe). Using both narrow-band imaging and long slit spectroscopy we have studied 15 new examples for interaction with the interstellar medium (ISM)…
Solar and heliospheric cosmic rays provide a unique perspective in cosmic ray research: we can observe not only the particles, but also the properties of the plasmas in which the they are accelerated and propagate, using in situ and…
Cosmological expansion on a local scale is usually neglected in part due to its smallness, and in part due to components of bound systems (especially those bound by non-gravitational forces such as atoms and nuclei) not following the…
This is a review of the status of efforts to model the large-scale Galactic magnetic field (GMF). Though important for a variety of astrophysical processes, the GMF remains poorly understood despite some interesting new tracers being used…
The selection of clusters of galaxies through their X-ray emission has proved to be an extremely powerful technique over the past four decades. The growth of X-ray astronomy has provided the community with a steadily more detailed view of…
After a decade of great progress in understanding gas flow into, out of, and through the Milky Way, we are poised to merge observations with simulations to build a comprehensive picture of the multi-scale magnetized interstellar medium…
Interferometry has brought many new constraints in optical astronomy in the recent years. A major leap in this field is the opening of large interferometric facilities like the Very Large Telescope Interferometer and the Keck Interferometer…
The rapid advances in infrared detector technology over the past decades have impelled the development of wide-field instruments, and shaped our view of the cold universe. Large scale surveys in our Galaxy have discovered hundreds of brown…
We have had the chance to live through a fascinating revolution in measuring the fundamental empirical cosmological Hubble law. The key progress is analysed : 1) improvement of observational means (ground-based radio and optical…
Despite strong evidence for the existence of large amounts of dark matter (DM) in our Universe, there is no direct indication of its presence in our own solar system. All estimates of the local DM density rely on extrapolating results on…