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NASAs Great Observatories have opened up the electromagnetic spectrum from space, providing sustained access to wavelengths not accessible from the ground. Together, Hubble, Compton, Chandra, and Spitzer have provided the scientific community with an agile and powerful suite of telescopes with which to attack broad scientific questions, and react to a rapidly changing scientific landscape. As the existing Great Observatories age, or are decommissioned, community access to these wavelengths will diminish, with an accompanying loss of scientific capability. This report, commissioned by the NASA Cosmic Origins, Physics of the Cosmos and Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Groups (PAGs), analyzes the importance of multi-wavelength observations from space during the epoch of the Great Observatories, providing examples that span a broad range of astrophysical investigations.
We review the history of space mission in Korea focusing on the field of astronomy and astrophysics. For each mission, scientific motivation and achievement are reviewed together with some technical details of the program including mission schedule. This review includes the ongoing and currently approved missions as well as some planned ones. Within the admitted limitations of authors perspectives, some comments on the future direction of space program for astronomy and astrophysics in Korea are made at the end of this review.
The identification of the carrier(s) of diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) is one of the oldest mysteries in stellar spectroscopy. With the advent of 8-10m-class telescopes substantial progress has been made in measuring the properties of DIBs in the optical and near-infrared wavelength domain, not only in the Galaxy, but also in different environments encountered in Local Group galaxies and beyond. Still, the DIB carriers have remained unidentified. The coming decade will witness the development of extremely large telescopes (GMT, TMT and E-ELT) and their instrumentation. In this overview I will highlight the current instrumentation plan of these future observatories, emphasizing their potential role in solving the enigma of the DIBs.
Breakup reactions are generally quite complicated, they involve nuclear and electromagnetic forces including interference effects. Coulomb dissociation is an especially simple and important mechanism since the perturbation due to the electric field of the nucleus is exactly known. Therefore firm conclusions can be drawn from such measurements. Electromagnetic matrixelements, radiative capture cross-sections and astrophysical S-factors can be extracted from experiments. We describe the basic theory, give analytical results for higher order effects in the dissociation of neutron halo nuclei and briefly review the experimental results obtained up to now. Some new applications of Coulomb dissociation for nuclear astrophysics and nuclear structure physics are discussed.
The future of astronomy is inextricably entwined with the care and feeding of astronomical data products. Community standards such as FITS and NDF have been instrumental in the success of numerous astronomy projects. Their very success challenges us to entertain pragmatic strategies to adapt and evolve the standards to meet the aggressive data-handling requirements of facilities now being designed and built. We discuss characteristics that have made standards successful in the past, as well as desirable features for the future, and an open discussion follows.
We consider a class of toy models where a spatially flat universe is filled with a perfect fluid. The dynamics is found exactly for all these models. In one family, the perfect fluid is of the phantom type and we find that the universe is first contracting and then expanding while the dynamics is always accelerated. In a second family, the universe is first in an accelerated expansion stage, then in a decelerated expansion stage until it reaches a turning point after which it contracts in a decelerated way (increasing contraction rate) followed by another accelerated stage (decreasing contraction rate). We also consider the possibility to embed this perfect fluid in a realistic cosmology. The first family cannot be viable in a conventional big bang universe and requires a rebound in the very early universe. The second family is viable in the range $0<1+w_{DE,0}lesssim 0.09$ for a spatially closed universe with a curvature satisfying current bounds. Though many of the models in this family cannot be distinguished today from a universe dominated by a cosmological constant, the present accelerated expansion is transient and these universes will reach a turning point in the future before entering a contraction phase.