A tool derived for the technological watch (Tetralogie) is applied to a dataset of three consecutive years of article abstracts published in the European Journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. This tool is based on a two step approach: first, a pretreatment step that extracts elementary items from the raw information (keywords, authors, year of publication, etc.); second, a mining step that analys...

Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based telescopes to reach the diffraction limit and thus providing spatial resolution superior to that achievable from space with current or planned satellites. In thi...

Kilometer-scale neutrino detectors such as IceCube are discovery instruments covering nuclear and particle physics, cosmology and astronomy. Examples of their multidisciplinary missions include the search for the particle nature of dark matter and for additional small dimensions of space. In the end, their conceptual design is very much anchored to the observational fact that Nature accelerates...

The least-squares (or Lomb-Scargle) periodogram is a powerful tool which is used routinely in many branches of astronomy to search for periodicities in observational data. The problem of assessing statistical significance of candidate periodicities for different periodograms is considered. Based on results in extreme value theory, improved analytic estimations of false alarm probabilities are g...

High Performance Computing is steadily increasing in importance for theoretical and observational astronomy. Largely through CFI, Canadian astrophysicists have unprecedented access to near world-class facilities. We review the contributions of computational astrophysics as a leading-edge player in the development of highly parallel applications and scalable algorithms with a particular focus on...

An overview on the present observational status and phenomenological understanding of cosmic rays above 10 eV is given. Above these energies the cosmic ray flux is expected to be gradually dominated by an extra-galactic component. In order to investigate the nature of this transition, current experimental activities focus on the measurement of the cosmic ray flux and composition at the ’ankle’ ...

Large gravitational wave interferometric detectors, like Virgo and LIGO, demonstrated the capability to reach their design sensitivity, but to transform these machines into an effective observational instrument for gravitational wave astronomy a large improvement in sensitivity is required. Advanced detectors in the near future and third-generation observatories in more than one decade will ope...

Gamma-ray line observations provide a versatile tool for studies of nucleosynthesis processes and supernova physics. In particular, the observation of radioactive species in the interstellar medium probes recent nucleosynthesis activity on various time-scales for different kinds of sources. Considerable progress in gamma-ray instrumentation during the last decades has led to the discovery of se...

We describe work investigating how astronomical simulation data can be effectively incorporated into the Virtual Observatory. We focus specifically on determining whether the data query, access and retrieval standards being developed by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance for observational data can be similarly applied to, and fully support, the requirements of data extracted from as...

Various methods of radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation methods at radio astronomy telescopes are being considered. Special attention is given to real-time processing algorithms. Computer simulations and observational results are used to describe the applicability of these methods. Best results can be achieved when the RFI mitigation procedures are adapted to the particular radio teles...