Every ten years since the 1960s astronomers and astrophysicists in the United States come together to compile a list of priorities for means and instruments. These surveys require scientists to think about priorities
Need expensive tools to learn about the universe, but projects like the very large array of radio astronomy in New Mexico and the X-ray chandra observatory orbiting the earth have promoted scientific knowledge in ways that would not have been possible without these devices. Every ten years astronomers and astrophysicists outline priorities for the equipment they need in the decade-long survey on astronomy and astrophysics. The latest edition of the survey was published by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine at the end of 2021, and discussions on funding will be conducted at full speed in the next fiscal year.
I am a professor of astronomy and my research depends on the means and equipment created following a recommendation in one of these ten two year surveys, and I was involved in the previous survey published in 2010.
The latest wish list is full of fascinating projects, and it will be exciting to see who gets funding and what research will come from them.
Every ten years since the 1960s astronomers and astrophysicists in the United States come together to compile a list of priorities for means and instruments.
The ten-year astronomers survey influences that it forces everyone to be coordinated and make tough choices. He has to moderate the ambitions in the constraints of reality, but when the astronomers and astrophysicists from the many sub-fields all work together, they come up with ideas that advance the whole field.
The headline of the latest report is “Paths to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics in the 1920s.” It is addressed to Congress and the three federal bodies that fund most of the astronomy research: NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Billions of dollars are at stake.
Producing the report is a major task involving 20 people on the Central Committee and more than a thousand contributing to the final report. The committee reviewed 573 position papers claiming for specific projects and astronomical capabilities. The final report has 615 pages and is not an easy read.
This approach is successful. Some of NASA’s most ambitious and productive scientific missions – such as the Web and Hubble Space Telescopes – have been proposed and funded through ten-year surveys.
Improving knowledge about planets outside the solar system – and looking for signs of life in them – is an important goal that the research community noted in the report.
The committee identified 24 important scientific questions for the next generation of astronomy. They are divided into three main topics which are science on the largest scale, and the means in the wish list are designed to address these issues.
The first is the study of the earth-like worlds. Thanks to the huge increase in the discovery of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), the number of known planets outside the solar system doubles every two years or so. Among the more than 5,000 known exoplanets there are several hundred that are similar to Earth and have the potential to sustain life. A major goal for the next ten years is to build new large telescopes on Earth and in space with devices that can “sniff” the atmospheres of Earth-like planets to try to detect gases like oxygen, which on Earth are produced by bacteria (this is also one of the tasks of the Web Telescope, but To perform it he will have to adopt the limit of his ability AB).
The second is to advance multiple apostolic astronomy – a relatively new field of astrophysics that takes information on gravitational waves, elementary particles and magnetic radiation and combines everything to gain deeper insights into the astrophysics underlying the universe. In this case, the need is less for new scientific tools and more for grants to enable researchers to work together and share data. The scientific goal is to know more about cosmic explosions and mergers of compact objects like neutron stars and black holes.
The latest topic is the study of cosmic interactions, especially the origin and evolution of galaxies and the massive black holes at their centers. By watching very distant galaxies astronomers can look at the past that takes time to reach Earth, so to understand these large and complex systems scientists will need giant optical telescopes to find galaxies far away in the young universe, and also radio telescopes to peek into their dusty heart and reveal The black holes.
For an article in The Conversation