
This roadmap, released in early 2014, presents a science-driven 30-year vision for the future of NASA Astrophysics that builds on recent remarkable discoveries to address three defining questions: Are we alone? How did we get here? How does the universe work? Enduring Quests * Are We Alone? * The Exoplanet Zoo * What Are Exoplanets Like? * The Search for Life * Activities by Era * How Did We Get Here? * Stellar Life Cycles and the Evolution of the Elements * The Archaeology of the Milky Way and Its Neighbors * The History of Galaxies * Activities by Era * How Does Our Universe Work? * The Origin and Fate of the Universe * Revealing the Extremes of Nature * Listening to the Cosmos * Activities by Era * Public Engagement: Connecting Through Astronomy * The continuum of astronomy learners * Audiences: From online to one-on-one * Realizing the Vision: Notional Missions and Technologies * Formative Era * The Visionary Era * Cross-cutting, Game-changing Technologies * Science Summary * Technology Summary * Daring Visions * Acronyms Seeking answers to these age-old questions are Enduring Quests of humankind. The coming decades will see giant strides forward in finding earthlike habitable worlds (exoEarths), in understanding the history of star and galaxy formation and evolution, and in teasing out the fundamental physics of the cosmos. * Different astronomical phenomena are typically most prominent in distinct regions of the electromagnetic spectrum: young, dust-enshrouded stars in the far-infrared; older stars and galaxies in visible and near-optical wavelengths; star-forming regions in the ultraviolet, and the million-degree gas of galaxy clusters and black hole accretion disks in X-rays. In addition to spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, the roadmap missions will open a revolutionary new window on the cosmos by detecting gravitational waves, ripples of space-time that emanate from colossal events like the merging of two black holes. These scientific investigations an
Page Count:
112
Publication Date:
2017-10-02
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