Bibcode
Gómez de Castro, A. I.; Appourchaux, Thierry; Barstow, Martin A.; Barthelemy, Mathieu; Baudin, Frederic; Benetti, Stefano; Blay, Pere; Brosch, Noah; Bunce, Emma; de Martino, Domitilla; Deharveng, Jean-Michel; Ferlet, Roger; France, Kevin; García, M.; Gänsicke, Boris; Gry, Cecile; Hillenbrand, Lynne; Josselin, Eric; Kehrig, Carolina; Lamy, Laurent; Lapington, Jon; Lecavelier des Etangs, Alain; LePetit, Frank; López-Santiago, Javier; Milliard, Bruno; Monier, Richard; Naletto, Giampiero; Nazé, Yael; Neiner, Coralie; Nichols, Jonathan; Orio, Marina; Pagano, Isabella; Peroux, Céline; Rauw, Gregor; Shore, Steven; Spaans, Marco; Tovmassian, Gagik; ud-Doula, Asif; Vilchez, José
Bibliographical reference
Astrophysics and Space Science, Volume 354, Issue 1, pp.229-246
Advertised on:
11
2014
Journal
Citations
10
Refereed citations
9
Description
This contribution gathers the contents of the white paper submitted by
the UV community to the Call issued by the European Space Agency in
March 2013, for the definition of the L2 and L3 missions in the ESA
science program. We outlined the key science that a large UV facility
would make possible and the instrumentation to be implemented. The
growth of luminous structures and the building blocks of life in the
Universe began as primordial gas was processed in stars and mixed at
galactic scales. The mechanisms responsible for this development are not
well-understood and have changed over the intervening 13 billion years.
To follow the evolution of matter over cosmic time, it is necessary to
study the strongest (resonance) transitions of the most abundant species
in the Universe. Most of them are in the ultraviolet (UV; 950
Å-3000 Å) spectral range that is unobservable from the
ground. A versatile space observatory with UV sensitivity a factor of
50-100 greater than existing facilities will revolutionize our
understanding of the Universe. Habitable planets grow in protostellar
discs under ultraviolet irradiation, a by-product of the star-disk
interaction that drives the physical and chemical evolution of discs and
young planetary systems. The electronic transitions of the most abundant
molecules are pumped by this UV field, providing unique diagnostics of
the planet-forming environment that cannot be accessed from the ground.
Earth's atmosphere is in constant interaction with the interplanetary
medium and the solar UV radiation field. A 50-100 times improvement in
sensitivity would enable the observation of the key atmospheric
ingredients of Earth-like exoplanets (carbon, oxygen, ozone), provide
crucial input for models of biologically active worlds outside the solar
system, and provide the phenomenological baseline to understand the
Earth atmosphere in context.
Related projects
Physical properties and evolution of Massive Stars
This project aims at the searching, observation and analysis of massive stars in nearby galaxies to provide a solid empirical ground to understand their physical properties as a function of those key parameters that gobern their evolution (i.e. mass, spin, metallicity, mass loss, and binary interaction). Massive stars are central objects to
Sergio
Simón Díaz