Recent Talks

As the number and variety of communications satellites proliferate in the rapidly accelerating New Space Age, specialists and lay observers alike have weighed the implications of a crowded orbital environment for astronomical research. The satellite launch tempo has recently increased dramatically, but conflict over the safe use of outer space has a much longer history. This talk will focus on similar debates surrounding experimental communications satellites from the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably a controversial test system known as Project West Ford. Astronomers have long acted as environmental watchdogs for outer space even as the power landscape in the international aerospace industry shifted during the decades since West Ford. What lessons might current astronomers take from past conflicts over the integrity of the night sky to address contemporary and future risk?

Pequeñas charlas consecutivas de 5 minutos sobre el trabajo de los becarios de verano en el IAC.

Youtube:

https://youtube.com/live/HrVzwfY33bQ?feature=share

The combination of stellar proper motions measured by the Gaia mission with spectroscopic radial velocities has recently enabled the precise determination of the
orbits of Milky Way stars and globular clusters. The information on their dynamics, coupled with existing chemical information, has allowed us to unravel many unknowns on their
origin and evolution, as well as on the assembly history of the Milky Way itself. In this talk I will present the most recent results on this topic, focusing on how globular
clusters can be superior tracers of the Milky Way build-up, and introducing a project, named CARMA, that aims at using globular cluster ages to characterise the most important
merger events experienced by our Galaxy.

Pequeñas charlas consecutivas de 5 minutos sobre el trabajo de los becarios de verano en el IAC.

Entrar Zoom Reunión
https://rediris.zoom.us/j/89609059257

ID de reunión: 896 0905 9257

Planets orbiting close to hot stars experience intense extreme-ultraviolet radiation, potentially leading to atmosphere evaporation and to thermal dissociation of molecules. However, this extreme regime remains mainly unexplored due to observational challenges. Only a single known ultra-hot giant planet, KELT-9b, receives enough ultraviolet radiation for molecular dissociation, with a day-side temperature of ~4,600K. An alternative approach uses irradiated brown dwarfs as hot-Jupiter analogues. With atmospheres and radii similar to those of giant planets, brown dwarfs orbiting close to hot Earth-sized white dwarf stars can be directly detected above the glare of the star.

In this talk I will present the discovery of an extremely irradiated low-mass companion to the hot white dwarf WD0032–317, focusing on the observational aspects of the discovery. Our analysis indicates a day-side temperature of ~8,000K, and a day-to-night temperature difference of ~6,000K. The amount of extreme-ultraviolet radiation received by WD0032–317B is equivalent to that received by planets orbiting close to stars as hot as late B-type stars, and about 5,600 times higher than that of KELT-9b. With a mass of ~75–88 Jupiter masses, this near-hydrogen-burning-limit object is potentially one of the most massive brown dwarfs known.

Simons Observatory (SO) is a new Cosmic Microwave Background telescope currently under construction in the Atacama Desert, close to ALMA and other recent CMB telescopes. It will have six small aperture (42cm) telescopes (SATs), and one large aperture (6m) telescope (LAT), observing at 30-280GHz (1-10mm) using transition edge sensors (TES) and kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs). As well as observing the polarisation of the CMB to unprecedented sensitivity, the LAT will perform a constant survey at higher angular resolution, enabling the systematic detection of transient sources in the submm, with large overlap of optical surveys such as LSST, DESI and DES. As well as giving an overview of SO, I summarise the types of transient sources that are expected to be seen by SO, including flaring stars, quasars, asteroids, and man-made satellites.

El Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre (AITC), que forma parte de la Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics de la Universidad Nacional de Australia, cuenta con un equipo de alrededor de 50 ingenieros e investigadores, tanto de Australia como de diversas partes del mundo, dedicados al desarrollo de instrumentación para telescopios, ya sean terrestres o espaciales.

En esta presentación, la Dra. Noelia Martínez brindará una visión general de los proyectos principales que se están llevando a cabo en el AITC en el marco del programa de óptica adaptativa con estrellas guía láser. El equipo de óptica adaptativa de la ANU trabaja en sistemas aplicados a la astrofísica, la detección de basura espacial y las comunicaciones ópticas. Noelia presentará proyectos que actualmente se encuentran en la fase de diseño final, como el sistema de óptica adaptativa de ground layer para el telescopio Subaru de 8 metros, en Hawaii. En este proyecto, la ANU tiene la responsabilidad del módulo del sensor de frente de onda y de la infraestructura de telescopio para las estrellas guía láser. Además, se abordará el desarrollo del sistema de óptica adaptativa de tomografía láser para el GMT, el telescopio de 25 metros que se instalará en Las Campanas, Chile.

Teniendo en cuenta el crecimiento exponencial del portafolio de proyectos en el programa de investigación de estrellas guía láser, Noelia busca aprovechar esta oportunidad para explorar áreas de colaboración entre los investigadores e ingenieros del IAC y de la ANU.

Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZsJv78yMks

Astronomy has traditionally been an open science with a wide-spread attitude of sharing and exchange of best practices. Outside of astronomy, a strong movement towards Open Access Publishing has taken place during recent years, which is now affecting all scientific subject areas.

In this presentation, we will give a quick overview of what Open Access is and what it means for astronomy, and will review the current publishing models of core astronomy journals. A special focus will be the support libraries provide to scientists to make the best use of the Open Access options available to them, as well as the ways in which librarians help to shape movements in scholarly communication in order to establish a more collaborative, transparent publishing landscape.

Slurm Workload Manager (formerly known as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM), or simply Slurm, is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters.

While Slurm has been used at the IAC in the LaPalma supercomputer and deimos/diva for a long time, we are now starting to also use it in public "burros" (and project burros that request it), in order to ensure
a more efficient and balanced use of these powerful (but shared amongst many users) machines.

While using Slurm is quite easy, we are aware that it involves some changes for users. To help you understand how Slurm works and how to best use it, in this talk I will focus on: why we need queues; an introduction to Slurm usage; Slurm configuration in LaPalma/diva/burros;
use cases (including interactive jobs); ensuring a fair usage amongst users and an efficient use of the machines; etc.

[If you are already a Slurm user and have specific questions/comments, you can post them in the #computing/slurm stream in IAC-Zulip (https://iac-es.zulipchat.com) and I'll try to cover them during the
talk]

MOONS is a 0.8 to 1.8 microns multi-object spectrometer for the Nasmyth focus of UT1 that is being built by a consortium led by the UK-ATC. The instrument is fibre fed, has a multiplex of 1000 and covers a total field of 25 arc minutes in diameter with a high transmission. There are two spectral resolving powers, ~4000 spanning the full wavelength range and a higher resolution mode which gives ~9000 in the I window and ~20,000 in a region in H windows. The instrument itself has two main parts:

• The rotating front-end which is at the focal plane and houses the fibre positioners, acquisition system, metrology system for the fibres, etc., and
• The cryogenic spectrograph which houses the spectrograph optics, VPH gratings and detectors.

MOONS is now approaching completion and is due to be shipped to Paranal in March 2024. This talk presents the MOONS instrument, the science that it will allow, and its current status.