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Astronomy
and Astrophysics in the New Millennium is the most recent in a series
of surveys of the field conducted once every 10 years by committees
of leading astronomers. The current survey, authored by the Astronomy
and Astrophysics Survey Committee, provides recommendations for
a research program for the decade that addresses the key scientific
questions confronting
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Cover
Of The Current Survey Report
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astronomers
and astrophysicists today. The explosion of knowledge in recent
years, made possible by current facilities, has in turn raised a
wealth of intriguing new questions about the universe and its constituent
galaxies, stars, and planets. To answer them, astronomers will need
a diverse array of increasingly capable 21st-century tools. Current
challenges in astronomy and astrophysics, and the research initiatives
that the survey report recommends to address them (see high-priority
projects in astronomy and astrophysics), are the subject of this
web site.
One
millennium ago, the few astronomers working on Earth — in Asia (particularly
in China), in the Middle East, and in Mesoamerica — knew of only
six of the nine planets that orbit the Sun. Although they studied
the stars, they did not understand that these points of light were
as mighty as our own Sun, nor could they imagine the vast distances
that separate these stars from Earth. One millennium later humanity's
astronomical horizons, enlarged by observations made from every
part of our planet and above it, had expanded to include the entire
universe. Today we know that the Sun is but one of 300 billion stars
in the Milky Way Galaxy, which itself is but one of trillions of
galaxies within the visible universe. By peering billions of light-years
into space, telescopes look billions of years into the past to observe
the cosmos when it was young. Astronomers can now interpret what
they see within the framework of a well- tested model, called the
inflationary Big Bang theory. This theory describes how the cosmos
has evolved since the first 10 –36 second of cosmic time, the moment
of the Big Bang that began the universe. The universe has been expanding
ever since that moment. During the first billion years after the
Big Bang, galaxies and galaxy clusters began to emerge from a relatively
featureless cosmos. Most of the matter in the universe exists in
the form of dark matter, whose nature remains a mystery but whose
existence is convincingly deduced from its gravitational effect
on visible matter. Startling new observational evidence points to
an even more mysterious dark energy that pervades the universe,
driving the expansion to ever-greater velocities as time goes on.
One
cannot, of course, predict what astronomers will tell us in the
year 3000 A.D., or even in 2100 A.D. For the foreseeable future
of the next few decades, we can, however, summarize the defining
issues for astronomy and astrophysics by posing five fundamental
questions:
- How
did the universe begin, how did it evolve from a primordial soup
of elementary particles into the complex structures we see today,
and what fate lies in store for the cosmos?
- How
do galaxies first arise and mature?
- How
are stars born and how do they live and die?
- How
do planets form and change as they age?
- Does
life exist elsewhere in the universe?
Researchers
have now begun to gather the fundamental observational data that
will one day answer all of these questions. For only one do we already
have a fairly complete answer: We know about the lives of stars.
The development and observational validation of the theory of
what
astronomers call stellar evolution was arguably the greatest accomplishment
of 20th-century
astrophysics.
For the new century, astronomers' long-term goal is to assemble
a detailed picture of the formation, evolution, and destiny of the
universe, and of its constituent galaxies, stars, and planets, which
include the Milky Way, the Sun, and Earth.
To
achieve this goal, the Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee
believes that astronomers should carry out the following program
of observational and theoretical research:
- Map
the distribution of galaxies, gas, and dark matter in the universe,
and survey the stars and planets in the Milky Way. Mapping the
distant universe will help to reveal the formation of galaxies
in the early universe and their maturation to the present, the
evolution of primordial hydrogen and helium gas created in the
Big Bang into gas enriched with almost all of the elements found
in the periodic table, and the distribution and nature of the
mysterious dark matter that constitutes most of the matter in
the universe. Surveys within the Milky Way will help to reveal
how stars and planets are created in collapsing clouds of gas
and dust and the variety and abundance of planetary systems.
- Search
for life beyond Earth, and, if it is found, determine its nature
and its distribution in the Milky Way Galaxy. This goal is so
challenging and of such importance that it could occupy astronomers
for the foreseeable future. The search for evidence of life beyond
Earth through remote observation is a major focus of the new interdisciplinary
field of astrobiology.
- Use
the universe as a unique laboratory to test the known laws of
physics in regimes that are not accessible on Earth and to search
for entirely new physics. It is remarkable that the laws of physics
developed on Earth appear to be consistent with phenomena occurring
billions of light-years away and under extreme conditions radically
different from those under which the laws were derived and tested.
Researchers have only begun to probe the conditions near the event
horizons of black holes or in the very early universe. In these
environments, the tests of the laws of physics will be much more
stringent. New physical processes may be revealed that shed light
on the unification of the forces and particles of nature.
- Develop
a conceptual framework that accounts for the complete range of
astronomical observations. As with all scientific theories, such
a framework must be subject to continual checks by further observation.
For
the new decade, astronomers are poised to make progress in five
particular areas:
- Determining
the large-scale properties of the universe:its age, the types
of matter and energy that it contains, and the history of its
expansion;
- Studying
the dawn of the modern universe, when the first stars and galaxies
formed;
- Understanding
the formation and growth of black holes of all sizes;
- Studying
the formation of stars and their planetary systems, including
the birth and evolution of giant and terrestrial planets; and
- Understanding
the effects of the astronomical environment on Earth.
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