Recent Talks

The massive black holes found at the centers of most nearby galaxies including our own, are believed to be the ashes of the fuel that powered quasars early in the history of the universe. I will briefly review the astronomical evidence for these objects and then describe some of the exotic dynamical phenomena that originate in their vicinity, including hypervelocity stars, resonant relaxation, and warped and lopsided stellar disks.

At the end of 2008, on ideas of teams from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur (OCA) and IAC, the CoRoT satellite observed the star HD 46375, known to host a non-transiting Saturn-mass exoplanet with a 3.023 day period. HD 46375 is the brightest star with a known close-in planet in the CoRoT accessible field of view. As such, it was targeted by the CoRoT additional program and observed in a CCD normally dedicated to the asteroseismology program, to obtain an ultra-precise photometric lightcurve and detect or place upper limits on the brightness of the planet. In addition, a ground-based support was simultaneously performed with the high-resolution NARVAL spectro-polarimeter to constrain the stellar atmospheric and magnetic properties. In this seminar, I will present the main results, in particular the stellar constrain we obtained thanks to the detection of the oscillation mode signature and the plausible detection of the planetary signal, which, if confirmed with future observations, would be the first detection of phase changes in the visible for a non-transiting planet.

The proper characterization of the least massive population of the young Sigma Orionis star cluster is required to understand the form of the cluster mass function and its impact on our comprehension of the substellar formation processes. SOri70 (T5.5±1) and SOri73, two T-type cluster member candidates, would have likely masses between 3 and 7 MJup if their age is 3 Myr. SOri73 awaits confirmation of its methane atmosphere. Here I present the results of a search of T-type objects in an area of ~120 arcmin^2 in the Sigma Orionis cluster, the confirmation of the presence of methane absorption in SOri73 and the study of SOri70 and 73 cluster membership via photometric colors and accurate proper motion analysis. This results would have a dramatic impact in the cluster mass function, in one of the scenarios explored, they suggest a decrease in cluster members with planetary masses in the interval 3.5-6 Mjup.

We present the K band FP of the ETGs members of the clusters observed by the WINGS survey. The data confirm a different tilt of the FP with respect to the V solution and the presence of a substantial tilt in the K band. This led us to further investigate the hypothesis that ETG non-homology greatly contribute to the tilt of the FP.

The WINGS data show that there are now several evidence of both structural and dynamical non-homology for the class of ETGs. Among these we will discuss in detail the tight relation between the mass of the ETGs, their stellar mass-to-light ratio M/L, and the Sersic index n describing the shape of their light profiles. We guess through a series of mock simulations that this relation acts as a fine-tuning that keeps small the scatter around the FP. We therefore conclude that ETG non-homology is closely connected either with the problem of the tilt and with the small scatter around the FP.

ExPo is an imaging polarimeter that has been built in Utrecht University. ExPo works in the visible, and it combines the dual-beam technique, together with very short exposure times and a high polarization sensitivity. After four successful campaigns at the William Herschel Telescope, we have obtained polarization images of circumstellar environments around T Tau's and Herbig Ae's stars, evolved (post-AGB) stars and planets like Venus and Saturn. Our results prove the utility of imaging polarimetry to characterize faint structures around very different objects. In this talk I will go through the instrument details, and I will show some of our science results.

VIMOS is visible multi-object spectrometer operating on the VLT.  The high multiplex of the VLT visible imager and multi object/integral-field spectrometer, VIMOS, makes it a powerful instrument for large-scale spectroscopic surveys of faint sources. Following community input and recommendations by ESO's Science and Technology Committee, it was decided to upgrade the instrument in phases. The first phase of the upgrade is described and included changing the shutters, installing an active flexure compensation system, replacing the detectors with CCDs with a far better red sensitivity and less fringing, and improving the data reduction pipeline.

With imaging at 3.6 and 4.5 microns where the light in nearby galaxies is dominated by old stars, the Spitzer Survey of Nearby Galaxies (S4G) stands poised for an optimal view of stellar mass and structure in the local Universe.  I will describe an effort to construct accurate 2D stellar mass maps from S4G images, starting with a correction for non-stellar (e.g. PAH and hot dust) contaminant emission using only the two S4G images as inputs; contaminant emission is isolated from the old stellar light using an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) technique designed to separate statistically independent source distributions.  An inventory of recovered contaminants is established via comparison to the non-stellar emission in archival 8 micron images.  Once these contaminants are removed, maps of the underlying distribution of old stars are revealed that retain a high degree of structural information and exhibit [3.6]-[4.5] colors consistent with those of K and M giants.  Contaminant-free S4G maps constructed with this approach should be ideally suited for tracing the stellar mass in galaxies spanning a range of morphological properties, dust contents and star formation histories.

In recent years, many countries throughout the Middle East - in particular the more prosperous states - have made great progress in education, higher education, and scientific research. However, this has not often been matched by equivalent progress in astronomy and its related fields, despite the fact that many nations in the region consider astronomy a fundamental part of their cultural and scientific heritage. The current status of astronomy in the individual countries of the Middle East will be reviewed. The positive decision of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) (Commission 46) to take a proactive role through visits and consultancy in the region will also be discussed, including the founding of MEARIM - the Middle East and Africa Regional IAU Meeting (first meeting held in Cairo 2008). The challenges and proposals to move forward teaching and research in astronomy in the Middle East will be considered, with comments relating North African countries and new trends, including space research along with astronomical activities.

Teleportation of physical objects, transferring from one place to another without passing through intermediate locations, is not possible. However, teleportation of quantum states (the full information of quantum objects) is possible. Quantum teleportation is the faithful transfer of quantum states between systems, relying on the prior establishment of entanglement and using only classical communication during the transmission. In this talk I will first give an introduction of quantum teleportation and then present our on?going free?space quantum teleportation experiment between the two Canary Islands La Palma and Tenerife, separated by 144 km. Our scheme combines a Bell?state measurement, capable to identify two of the four Bell?states, with an actively triggered unitary transformation depending on its outcome. The scheme achieves the optimal teleportation efficiency achievable with linear optical elements. Our work is essential for showing the feasibility of satellite?based experiments and is an important step towards quantum?communication applications on a global scale.

We compare the Hubble type and the spectroscopic class of the galaxies with spectra in SDSS/DR7. As it is long known, elliptical galaxies tend to be red whereas spiral galaxies tend to be blue, however, this relationship presents a large scatter, which we measure and quantify in detail. We compare the Automatic Spectroscopic K-means based classification (ASK) with most of the commonly used morphological classifications. All of them provide consistent results. Given a spectral class, the morphological type wavers with a standard deviation between 2 and 3 T types, and the same large dispersion characterizes the variability of spectral classes fixed the morphological type. The distributions of Hubble types given an ASK class are very skewed -- they present long tails that go to the late morphological types for the red galaxies, and to the early morphological types for the blue spectroscopic classes. The scatter is not produced by problems in the classification, and it remains when particular subsets are considered. A considerable fraction of the red galaxies are spirals (40--60 %), but they never present very late Hubble types (Sd or later). Even though red spectra are not associated with ellipticals, most ellipticals do have red spectra: 97 % of the ellipticals in the morphological catalog by Nair & Abraham, used here for reference, belong to ASK 0, 2 or 3. It contains only a 3 % of blue ellipticals. The galaxies in the green valley class (ASK~5) are mostly spirals, and the AGN class (ASK 6) presents a large scatter of Hubble types from E to Sd. We investigate variations with redshift using a volume limited subsample. From redshift 0.25 to now the galaxies redden from ASK 2 to ASK 0, as expected from the passive evolution of their stellar populations. Two of the ASK classes (1 and 4) gather edge-on spirals, and they may be useful in studies requiring knowing the intrinsic shape of a galaxy (e.g., weak lensing calibration).