Astrophysics in Canada 1

1 High Time Resolution Astrophysics and Pulsars

The discovery of pulsars in 1968 heralded an era where the temporal characteristics of detectors had to be reassessed. Up to this point detector integration times would normally be measured in minutes rather seconds and definitely not on sub-second time scales. At the start of the 21st century pulsar observations are still pushing the limits of detector/telescope capabilities. Flux variations o...

Frontiers of Astrophysics -workshop Summary 1

We summarize recent results presented in the astrophysics session during a conference on \Frontiers of Contemporary Physics". We will discuss three main elds (High-Energy Astrophysics, Relativistic Astrophysics, and Cosmology), where Astrophysicists are pushing the limits of our knowledge of the physics of the universe to new frontiers. Since the highlights of early 1997 were the rst detection ...

Astrophysics.

Using the oscillation frequencies of α Cen A recently discovered by Bouchy & Carrier (2001, 2002), the available astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data, we tried to improve the calibration of the visual binary system α Cen. With the revisited masses of Pour-baix et al. (2002) we do not succeed to obtain a solution satisfying all the seismic observational constraints. Relaxing the const...

Generating Process Explanations in Nuclear Astrophysics Generating Explanations in Astrophysics

In this paper we describe ASTRA, a computational aid for generating process explanations in nuclear astrophysics. The system operates in two stages, the rst using knowledge of quantum theory to produce a set of legal reactions among elements and the second searching for pathways of such reactions that explain the evolution of some element in terms of lighter ones. ASTRA has found apparently nov...

Astrophysics.