Recent Talks

 Dr Roger Hoyland has been working at the IAC for the last 21 years on the Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments. He started out as a research assistant at Jodrell Bank, University of Manchester, near his home town. His expertise lies in sensitive microwave radiometer design. He has worked on various projects such as the Tenerife Experiments, The Planck Surveyor Mission and The QUIJOTE project.
This talk is for the general public (even if mostly scientific) and aims to explain some of the misunderstandings and myths about microwave devices that we use in our everyday life. There are many YouTube videos about the effects of microwaves but which do you believe? Does your mobile phone really cause interference in an airplane? Can you really destroy your credit card by carrying it next to your mobile? Does the EMP bomb really exist? All this and more…………….
With the help of several live experiments and some audience participation (be prepared!) you will find out the science behind the myths around mobiles, microwave ovens and other microwave devices.
PS: Please bring along your mobile phone if you have one.

In this talk I will present my view on what we know and what we don't know about the so-called secular evolution processes in galaxies. I will focus on the processes that lead to the building of main stellar components in the centre of disc galaxies, and explore how these processes fit in the current cosmological paradigm of galaxy formation and evolution. I will also make an attempt at clarifying misconceptions and discussing outstanding open questions.

I will describe the roles of jets in several quite different astrophysical systems. These include exploding core collapse supernovae, expelling common envelopes, and heating gas in clusters of galaxies. Hot bubbles inflated by jets seem to be a key ingredient in the interaction of jets with the ambient gas. The understanding that jets can efficiently interact with the ambient gas leads to new notions, such as the jittering jets model to explode massive stars, and the grazing envelope evolution(GEE) that can replace the common envelope evolution in some cases.

I will present results from The X-Shooter Lens Survey (XLENS). With XLENS we are unambiguously separate the stellar from the dark-matter content in the internal region of lens early-type galaxies (ETGs) to understand their interplay and to probe directly their formation and dynamical evolution. We combine precise strong gravitational lensing and dynamical constraints on the mass distribution with high signal-to-noise spectroscopy in the entire rest-frame visible to the NIR.In this talk I will present results obtained on a sample of very massive lens ETGs from the SLACS Survey, with velocity dispersions greater than 250 km/s and redshift>0.1.

First I will show how to constrain the low mass end of the Initial Mass Function (IMF)directly from galaxy optical spectra using a new set of non-degenerate optical spectroscopic indices which are strong in cool giants and dwarfs and almost absent in main sequence stars (Spiniello et al., 2014a). I will present unambiguous evidence that the low-mass end of the IMF is not universal. Then, I will demonstrate that the combination of this SSP modelling with a fully self-consistent joint lensing+dynamics analysis (Barnabè et al. 2012) allows us to disentangle IMF slope variations from internal dark-matter variations and, for the first time ever, to contemporary put constrains on the IMF cutoff mass (Barnabè et al., 2013, Spiniello et al., in prep).

All the elements from carbon to uranium present in the Solar System were produced by hundreds to thousands of stars belonging to different stellar generations that evolved and died during the presolar evolution of the Galaxy. Using the abundances of radioactive nuclei inferred from meteoritic analysis we can date the last of these stellar additions. We have found that the last contribution of elements such as carbon and slow neutron-capture elements to the Solar System from an asymptotic giant branch star occurred 15-30 Myr before the formation of the Sun. This provides us with an upper limit of the time when the precursor material of the Solar System became isolated from the bulk of the galactic material. Interestingly, it compares well to the lifetime of high-mass molecular clouds suggesting that the Sun was born in a very large family of stars.

In this talk we will present our most recent numerical and observational results on the formation, evolution, and X-ray emission from hot bubbles in nebulae around evolved stars. Our studies include hot bubbles around massive and low-mass stars, e.g., Wolf-Rayet nebulae and planetary nebulae. Our results show that the diffuse X-ray emission from these hot bubbles is a dynamic process that involves mixing of nebular material into the hot bubble due to hydrodynamical instabilities, photoevaporation, thermal conduction, and dust cooling. The formation of these hot bubbles is governed by the evolution of the stellar wind parameters, and its properties can be used to study stellar evolution.

We present correlation between quasar properties and large-scale density with the largest spectroscopic dataset of quasars and galaxies to date. We construct a galaxy (number) density field on large-scale (~15Mpc) using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 12 (DR12) Constant MASS (CMASS) galaxies following the 20 nearest-neighbors approach over the redshift range 0.46<z<0.59. Quasar sample is prepared from the DR7 of SDSS I/II. We examine a correlation of incidence of quasars with large-scale density and dependences of quasar properties such as bolometric luminosity, black hole mass, and Eddington ratio on large-scale density. We find a monotonic correlation between the quasar density and large-scale density, which is fitted well with a linear function in log-log space and doesn't change much with redshift. The dependences of quasar properties on the large-scale density are detected, but these are very weak. Based on the results, we discuss the possibility of using quasars as a tracer of Large-Scale Structure (LSS), which will be crucial in the near future to go more deeply in the universe.

One of the most exciting possibilities enabled by transiting exoplanets is to measure their atmospheric properties through the technique of transmission spectroscopy: the variation of the transit depth as a function of wavelength due to starlight interacting with the atmosphere of the exoplanet. Motivated by the need of optical transmission spectra of exoplanets, we recently launched the Arizona-CfA-Católica Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey (ACCESS), which aims at studying the atmospheres of ~20 exoplanets ranging from super-Earths to hot-Jupiters in the entire optical atmospheric window using ground-based facilities. In this talk, I will present the survey, the astrostatistical challenges it poses and first results.

The presence of Dark Matter (DM) is required in the universe regulated by the standard general relativistic theory of gravitation. The nature of DM is however still elusive to any experimental search. We discuss here the process of accumulation of evidence for the presence of DM in the universe, the astrophysical constraints for the leading DM scenarios that can be obtained through a multi-frequency analysis of cosmic structures on large scales, and a new strategy related to the search for the nature of the DM with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).