The Universe under the Microscope - Astronomy at High Angular Resolution

High angular resolution techniques at infrared and centimeter to millimeter wavelengths have become of ever increasing importance for astrophysical research in the past decade. They have led to important breakthroughs, like the direct imaging of protop...

High angular resolution techniques at infrared and centimeter to millimeter wavelengths have become of ever increasing importance for astrophysical research in the past decade. They have led to important breakthroughs, like the direct imaging of protoplanetary discs and of the first exoplanets, the measurement of stellar orbits around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, or the detection of sub-parsec-scale jets in low luminosity AGN. With adaptive optics in a mature state, infrared/optical astronomy is pushing toward extreme adaptive optics, extremely large telescopes, and infrared/optical interferometry with large aperture telescopes. At longer wavelengths, large arrays start to conquer the sub-millimeter window, with the mid-term goal of global VLBI at sub-millimeter wavelengths. These new techniques will have enormous impact on the field because they will enable us to address issues such as directly measuring the properties of exoplanets, imaging the surfaces of stars, examining stellar dynamics in extremely dense cluster cores, disentangling the processes at the bottom of black hole accretion flows in the jet launching region, or testing general relativity in the strong gravity regime near the event horizon of supermassive black holes. This conference aims at an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together astrophysicists from the three great branches of the field, instrumentation, observation, and theory, to discuss the current state of research and the possibilities offered by the next-generation instruments.

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