Committee for a Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics's scientific contributions

Publications (2)

Book
Every 10 years the National Research Council releases a survey of astronomy and astrophysics outlining priorities for the coming decade. The most recent survey, titled New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics, provides overall priorities and recommendations for the field as a whole based on a broad and comprehensive examination of sci...
Book
Driven by discoveries, and enabled by leaps in technology and imagination, our understanding of the universe has changed dramatically during the course of the last few decades. The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are making new connections to physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. Based on a broad and comprehensive survey of scient...

Citations

... Dark energy is hypothesized to explain the tending to accelerate the expansion of the universe. As stated in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey (2010) [21], the only way moving forward in understanding this mysterious component of our universe is to use the universe at large to infer the properties of dark energy by measuring its effects on the expansion rate and the growth of structure, (addressing the Frontier of Knowledge, Expansion of the Universe). Therefore, precision measurements of the expansion of the universe with time and of the rate at which cosmic structure grows are required. ...
... In addition, the sum of the neutrino masses [1] remains unknown. It is expected that the operational weak lensing surveys, including the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey 1 (HSC) [2], the Dark Energy Survey 2 (DES) [3], the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) 3 [4], the Prime Focus Spectrograph 4 [5], the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) [6], as well as near-future Stage-IV large-scale structure (LSS) surveys such as Euclid 5 [7], the Vera C. Rubin Observatory 6 [8], and the Roman Space Telescope 7 [9,10], will improve our understanding to many of the questions that cosmology is facing from high-precision measurements of the intervening mass distribution of the universe. ...