Recent Talks

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).

We find a distinct stellar population in the counterrotating and kinematically decoupled core of the isolated massive elliptical galaxy NGC 1700. Coinciding with the edge of this core, we find a significant change in the slope of the gradient of various representative absorption line indices. Our age estimate for this core is markedly younger than the main body of the galaxy. We find lower values for the age, metallicity, and Mg/Fe abundance ratio in the center of this galaxy when we compare them with other isolated elliptical galaxies with similar velocity dispersion. We discuss the different possible scenarios that might have lead to the formation of this younger kinematically decoupled structure and conclude that, in light of our findings, the ingestion of a small stellar companion on a retrograde orbit is the most favored.

In his public talk, Prof. Narayan will summarize our knowledge of Black Holes in the universe. He will describe how Black Holes are discovered, how their properties are measured, and what the results mean. He will also discuss the many ways in which Black Holes influence their surroundings and the profound effect they have had on the evolution of the universe.

An astrophysical black hole is completely described with just two parameters: its mass and its dimensionless spin. A few dozen black holes have mass estimates, but until recently none had a reliable spin estimate. The first spins have now been measured for black holes in X-ray binaries. The talk will describe the method used to make these measurements and will discuss implications of the results obtained so far.

Milky Way and most spiral galaxies present some features in the outer part of its disk such as S-warping or U-warping, flaring, lopsidedness, truncation/non-truncation and others, both for the stellar and the gas component. In the present talk, I will review some of the galactic dynamics hypotheses which try to explain these features: either in terms of gravitational interaction, magnetic fields, accretion of intergalactic matter or others. The gravitational interaction may be among the different components of the galaxy or between the spiral galaxy and another companion galaxy. The accretion of intergalactic matter may be either into the halo, with a later gravitational interaction between the misaligned halo and the disc, or directly onto the disc. The phenomena of the outer disc in spiral galaxies might be produced by more than a mechanism. Nonetheless, the hypothesis of accretion of intergalactic matter onto the disc presents several advantages over its competitors, since it explains most of the relevant observed features, whereas other hypotheses only explain them partially.

The present work shows the Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) in the near-infrared using the IRTF stellar library obtained using the models based on the Single Stellar population Models (SSP) from Vazdekis et al. (1996 - 2010) which work in the optical, and use the CaT and MILES stellar libraries. In this near-infrared research, the isochrones of Marigo et al. (2008) were chosen and which have a range of metallicity [Fe/H] between -2.27 and 0.019, and ages up to 15.85 Gy. Also, they provide the corresponding ?uxes in the IR bands I to M (0.7 to 5.0 microns). The IRTF stellar library contains spectra of 292 stars (F, G, K and M stars) at a resolution of 2000, between 0.8 to 5.2 microns. The features of the SED (spectrum obtained by the integration of the spectra of the stars, at constant metallicity and age) are analysed by comparing to those found on Ivanov et al. (2004) for the IR range. In addition, t he comparison of the models with galaxy observations of early type galaxies by Marmol-Queralto et al. (2009) are presented.