We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers lacking basic computer science aspects crucially important in the data intensive science era.
AstroSat is a multi-wavelength astronomy satellite, launched on 2015 September 28. It carries a suite of scientific instruments for multi-wavelength observations of astronomical sources. It is a major Indian effort in space astronomy and the context of AstroSat is examined in a historical perspective. The Performance Verification phase of AstroSat has been completed and all instruments are working flawlessly and as planned. Some brief highlights of the scientific results are also given here.
This document describes the Netherlands' decadal strategic planning process for the current decade. We give the scientific rationale for our prioritization of research areas and the facility choices that follow from our scientific priorities. We also describe actions needed for the sustainability of our community and our work, and the budgets needed to fulfil our stated ambitions. The names listed as authors are in fact the editors of this paper, which results from the work of the entire Netherlands astronomy community.
The situation of data sharing in astronomy is positioned in the current general context of a political push towards, and rapid development of, scientific data sharing. Data is already one of the major infrastructures of astronomy, thanks to the data and service providers and to the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). Other disciplines are moving on in the same direction. International organisations, in particular the Research Data Alliance (RDA), are developing building blocks and bridges to enable scientific data sharing across borders. The liaisons between RDA and astronomy, a…
A discussion of the history of scientific computing for Radio Astronomy in the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge in the decades after the Second World War. This covers the development of the aperture synthesis technique for Radio Astronomy and how that required using the new computing technology developed by the University's Mathematical Laboratory: the EDSAC, EDSAC 2 and TITAN computers. It looks at the scientific advances made by the Radio Astronomy group, particularly the assembling of evidence which contradicted the Steady State Hypothesis. It also examines the software a…
Small satellite platforms with high performance avionics are becoming more affordable. So far, with a few exceptions, small satellites have been mainly dedicated to earth observation. However, astronomy is a fascinating field with a history of large missions and a future of promising large mission candidates. This prompts many questions; can the recent affordability of small satellites change the landscape of space astronomy? What are the potential applications and scientific topics of interest, where small satellites could be instrumental for astronomy? What are the requirements and objective…
India and Belgium have jointly established two 4 meter class optical telescopes at Devasthal located in Nainital, India. After successful installation of the 3.6-m modern new technology Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) in 2015, it was technically activated by premiers of both countries from Brussels on March 30, 2016. Since then, the 3.6-m DOT has been used for both optical and near-Infrared (NIR) observations for a number of research proposals. The best angular resolution achieved is 0\farcsec4 indicating that the optics of the 3.6-m DOT is good and capable of providing images of the celesti…
One of the most regular activities of amateur clubs is scientific outreach, a paramount channel to disseminate scientific results. It is typically performed through talks given by both experts (professional astronomers) and non-experts to a diverse audience, including amateur astronomers. However, this is a rather passive, one-way, approach. The advance of technology has provided all the tools that can help the audience/amateurs to become more active in the scientific output. What is often missing is the proper guidance. To address that within the Greek amateur community the Hellenic Amateur A…
The use of Python is noticeably growing among the scientific community, and Astronomy is not an exception. The power of Python consists of being an extremely versatile high-level language, easy to program that combines both traditional programming and data reduction and analysis tools. Here I make a brief introduction to Python, mentioning a few programming practices implemented in the language and some of its useful features on the process of data manipulation. I cover in a little more detail the standard scientific libraries (NumPy and SciPy) for data handling, the graphical library (Matplot…
Astronomy plays a major role in the scientific landscape of Namibia and Southern Africa. Considerable progress has been achieved scientifically as well as in terms of human capacity development in the field. In all wavelength regimes accessible with ground-based instruments, the largest of those instruments are situated in Southern Africa: MeerKAT, the Southern African Large Telescope, and the High Energy Stereoscopic System. Because of the excellent observing conditions from Namibian soil, further large-scale projects such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array considered sites in Namibia and the A…
We show that, in addition to specific science goals, there is a strong case for conducting an all-sky (i.e. the visible 3-pi steradians) SKA continuum survey which does not fit neatly into conventional science cases. History shows that the greatest scientific impact of most major telescopes (e.g., HST, VLA) lies beyond the original goals used to justify the telescope. The design of the telescope therefore needs to maximise the ultimate scientific productivity, in addition to achieving the specific science goals. In this chapter, we show that an all-sky continuum survey is likely to achieve tra…
We review the relatively new, internet-enabled, and rapidly-evolving field of citizen science, focusing on research projects in stellar, extragalactic and solar system astronomy that have benefited from the participation of members of the public, often in large numbers. We find these volunteers making contributions to astronomy in a variety of ways: making and analyzing new observations, visually classifying features in images and light curves, exploring models constrained by astronomical datasets, and initiating new scientific enquiries. The most productive citizen astronomy projects involve …
The Ultraviolet Transient Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT) is a space-borne near UV telescope with an unprecedented large field of view (200 sq. deg.). The mission, led by the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Israel Space Agency in collaboration with DESY (Helmholtz association, Germany) and NASA (USA), is fully funded and expected to be launched to a geostationary transfer orbit in Q2/3 of 2025. With a grasp 300 times larger than GALEX, the most sensitive UV satellite to date, ULTRASAT will revolutionize our understanding of the hot transient universe, as well as of flaring galactic source…
Visualizing and navigating through large astronomy images from a remote location with current astronomy display tools can be a frustrating experience in terms of speed and ergonomics, especially on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a high performance, versatile and robust client-server system for remote visualization and analysis of extremely large scientific images. Applications of this work include survey image quality control, interactive data query and exploration, citizen science, as well as public outreach. The proposed software is entirely open source and is designed to be gener…
A major goal for the astronomy and astrophysics communities is the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in all ranks, from students through professional scientific researchers. Large scientific collaborations - increasingly a primary place for both professional interactions and research opportunities - can play an important role in the DEI effort. Multimessenger astronomy, a new and growing field, is based on the principle that working collaboratively produces synergies, enabling advances that would not be possible without cooperation. The nascent Multimessenger Diversity Network …
AstroVisBench: A Code Benchmark for Scientific Computing and Visualization in Astronomy
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；NSF National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory（国家光学红外天文研究实验室）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory（斯坦福直线加速器实验室）；Texas Advanced Computing Center（德克萨斯高级计算中心）
Rethinking Domain Specialization for Open-Ended Scientific Reasoning in Astronomy Language Models
Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；QUP/IPNS, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)（高能加速器研究机构（KEK）QUP/IPNS）；Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie（马克斯·普朗克天文研究所）
The Mayan culture collected exquisite astronomical data for over a millennium. However, it failed to come up with the breakthrough ideas of modern astronomy because the data was analyzed within a mythological culture of astrology that rested upon false but mathematically sophisticated theories about the Universe. Have we learned the necessary lessons to prevent our current scientific culture from resembling Mayan Astronomy? Clearly, data collection by itself is not a guarantee for good science as commonly assumed by funding agencies. A vibrant scientific culture should cultivate multiple appro…
Recent news reports claim that China is overtaking the United States and all other countries in scientific productivity and scientific impact. A straightforward analysis of high-impact papers in astronomy reveals that this is not true in our field. In fact, the United States continues to host, by a large margin, the authors that lead high-impact papers. Moreover, this analysis shows that 90% of all high-impact papers in astronomy are led by authors based in North America and Europe. That is, only about 10% of countries in the world host astronomers that publish "astronomy's greatest hits".
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a ground-based facility for very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy, will operate as an open observatory, serving a wide scientific community to explore and to study the non-thermal universe. Open community access is a novelty in this domain, putting a challenge on the implementation of services that make VHE gamma-ray astronomy as accessible as any other waveband. We present here the design of the CTA Observer Access system that comprises support of scientific users, dissemination of data and software, tools for scientific analysis, and the system to su…
As the oldest science common to all human cultures, astronomy has a unique connection to indigenous knowledge (IK) and the long history of indigenous scientific contributions. Many STEM disciplines, agencies and institutions have begun to do the work of recruiting and retaining underrepresented minorities, including indigenous, Native American and Native Hawaiian professionals. However, with the expansion of telescope facilities on sacred tribal or indigenous lands in recent decades, and the current urgency of global crises related to climate, food/water sovereignty and the future of humanity,…
We explore how astronomers take observational data from telescopes, process them into usable scientific data products, curate them for later use, and reuse data for further inquiry. Astronomers have invested heavily in knowledge infrastructures - robust networks of people, artifacts, and institutions that generate, share, and maintain specific knowledge about the human and natural worlds. Drawing upon a decade of interviews and ethnography, this article compares how three astronomy groups capture, process, and archive data, and for whom. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a mission with a dedicat…
Data collection for scientific applications is increasing exponentially and is forecasted to soon reach peta- and exabyte scales. Applications which process and analyze scientific data must be scalable and focus on execution performance to keep pace. In the field of radio astronomy, in addition to increasingly large datasets, tasks such as the identification of transient radio signals from extrasolar sources are computationally expensive. We present a scalable approach to radio pulsar detection written in Scala that parallelizes candidate identification to take advantage of in-memory task proc…
Citizen science refers to scientific research conducted or participated by non-professional scientists (such as hobbyists or members from the general public). Citizen astronomy is a classic example of citizen science. Citizen astronomers has benefited from technological advancements in the recent decades as they fill the scientific gaps left by professional astronomers, in the areas such as time domain observations, visual classification and data mining. Chinese citizen astronomers have made a visible contribution in the discoveries of new objects; however, comparing to their counterparts in t…
Over its more than thirty-year history, the Advanced Technologies and Instrumentation (ATI) program has provided grants to support technology development for ground-based astronomy. Research from this program has advanced adaptive optics, high resolution and multi-object spectroscopy, optical interferometry and synoptic surveys, to name just a few. Previous and ongoing scientific advances span the entire field of astronomy, from studies of the Sun to the distant universe. Through a combination of literature assessment and individual case studies, we present a survey of ATI funded research for …
The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL ascl.net), started in 1999, is a free open registry of software used in refereed astronomy research. Over the past few years, it has spearheaded an effort to form a consortium of scientific software registries and repositories. In 2019 and 2020, ASCL contacted editors and maintainers of discipline and institutional software registries and repositories in math, biology, neuroscience, geophysics, remote sensing, and other fields to develop a list of best practices for these research software resources. At the completion of that project, performed as a T…
Scientific writing is an important skill for a career as a professional astrophysicist. Very few researchers, however, receive any formal training in how to write scientific research papers of high quality in an efficient manner. This paper (Paper I) is the first of a two-part self-help guide in scientific writing to address this skills gap. Paper I focuses on planning your academic research paper in astronomy. We discuss how to crystallise the ideas that underlie a research project, analyse how the paper can be constructed considering the audience and the chosen journal, and give an overview …
This paper presents a brief overview of how astronomy can help society in COVID-19 times, and the lessons that come from studying our place in the Universe and the global coordination of scientific and outreach activities. Several examples coordinated by the International Astronomical Union are presented.
Designing the Community Infrastructure for ESO's Next Transformational Facility. Equitable Governance and Sustainable Teams for 2040s Astronomy
University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；European Southern Observatory（欧洲南方天文台）；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Indian Institute of Astrophysics（印度天体物理研究所）；INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte（意大利国家天体物理研究所卡波迪蒙特天文台）；University of Atacama（阿塔卡马大学）；Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, CNES, LAM（艾克斯-马赛大学、法国国家科学研究中心、法国国家空间研究中心、拉格朗日实验室）；Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP)（波茨坦莱布尼茨天体物理研究所）
Radio astronomy commenced in earnest after World War II, with Australia keenly engaged through the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. At this juncture, Australia's Commonwealth Solar Observatory expanded its portfolio from primarily studying solar phenomena to conducting stellar and extragalactic research. Subsequently, in the 1950s and 1960s, astronomy gradually became taught and researched in Australian universities. However, most scientific publications from this era of growth and discovery have no country of affiliation in their header information, making it hard to find the A…
The use of computers and the role of women in radio astronomy and X-ray crystallography research at the Cavendish Laboratory between 1949 and 1975 have been investigated. We recorded examples of when computers were used, what they were used for and who used them from hundreds of papers published during these years. The use of the EDSAC, EDSAC 2 and TITAN computers was found to increase considerably over this time-scale and they were used for a diverse range of applications. The majority of references to computer operators and programmers referred to women, 57% for astronomy and 62% for crystal…
We argue that it is essential that the Astro2020 survey of the present state of American astronomy and the recommendations for the next decade address the issue of ensuring preservation of, and making more discoverable and accessible, the field's rich legacy materials. These include both archived observations of scientific value and items of historical importance. Much of this heritage likely will be lost if action is not taken in the next decade. It is proposed that the decadal plan include recommendations on (1) compiling a list of historic sites and development of models for their preservat…
Nine interviews were conducted with astronomers from Leiden University, and a document analysis was performed on relevant institutional (self-) evaluation documents, annual reports, and CVs of the interviewees. The aim was to perform a qualitative study about the relationship between the research behaviour of astronomers and how their science is being evaluated. This study encompassed the funding and publication system as well as the indicators used to measure the scientific output, its quality and the research performance. This report sheds light on how astronomers define high-quality researc…
Uncertainty quantification is a key part of astronomy and physics; scientific researchers attempt to model both statistical and systematic uncertainties in their data as best as possible, often using a Bayesian framework. Decisions might then be made on the resulting uncertainty quantification -- perhaps whether or not to believe in a certain theory, or whether to take certain actions. However it is well known that most statistical claims should be taken contextually; even if certain models are excluded at a very high degree of confidence, researchers are typically aware there may be systemati…
Africa has amazing potential due to natural (such as dark sky) and human resources for scientific research in astronomy and space science. At the same time, the continent is still facing many difficulties, and its countries are now recognising the importance of astronomy, space science and satellite technologies for improving some of their principal socio-economic challenges. The development of astronomy in Africa (including Ethiopia) has grown significantly over the past few years, and never before it was more possible to use astronomy for education, outreach, and development as it is now. Ho…
Designing an Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models in Astronomy Research
Space Telescope Science Institute（空间望远镜科学研究所）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Loyola University Maryland（马里兰州洛约拉大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；European Space Astronomy Centre（欧洲空间天文中心）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
The first direct detection of gravitational waves emitted from a pair of merging black holes in 2015 has been heralded as one of most significant scientific breakthroughs in physics and astronomy of the 21st century. Motivated by the tremendous scientific opportunities now opened by gravitational-wave observatories and recognizing that to fully exploit the new field will require new observatories that may take 15 to 20 years from conception until operations begin, the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) convened a subcommittee to examine the path to build and operate a network of…
Toward decision-aware AI for LSST-scale time-domain astronomy
Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas（巴西物理研究中心）；Laboratorio Interinstitucional de e-Astronomia-LIneA（跨机构电子天文学实验室）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo（意大利国家天体物理研究所巴勒莫天文台）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
