Recent Talks

I will present an evolutionary model for the origin of Andromeda II, a dSph satellite of M31, involving a merger between two disky dwarf galaxies than explains the origin of prolate rotation recently detected in the kinematic data for And II. The simulation traces the evolution of two dwarfs, whose structural parameters differ only in their disk scale lengths, placed on a radial orbit towards each other with their angular momenta inclined by 90 deg. After 5 Gyr the merger remnant forms a stable triaxial galaxy with rotation only around the longest axis. This prolate rotation is naturally explained as due to the symmetry of the initial configuration which leads to the conservation of angular momentum components along the direction of the merger. The stars originating from the two dwarfs show significantly different surface density profiles while having very similar kinematics in agreement with the properties of separate stellar populations in And II. I will also discuss an alternative scenario for the formation of And II, via tidal stirring of a disky dwarf galaxy. While intrinsic rotation occurs naturally in this model as a remnant of the initial rotation of the disk, it is mostly around the shortest axis of the stellar component. The rotation around the longest axis is induced only occasionally and remains much smaller that the system's velocity dispersion. I conclude that although tidal origin of the velocity distribution in And II cannot be excluded, it is much more naturally explained within the scenario involving a past merger event. Thus, in principle, the presence of prolate rotation in dSph galaxies of the Local Group and beyond may be used as an indicator of major mergers in their history or even as a way to distinguish between the two scenarios of their formation.

The Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO) Space Program on the International Space Station (ISS) is the first space-based mission worldwide in the field of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR) and Extremely High Energy Cosmic Rays (EHECR) and will contribute to consolidate a new window in the astronomical observation at the highest energies never observed neither with ground-based nor space-based experiments. Currently the international groups working on ground-based UHECR experiments are organized in the Pierre Auger Collaboration (Argentina, South Hemisphere) and the
Telescope Array Collaboration (Utah, North Hemisphere). JEM-EUSO will pioneer from Space the observation from ISS (North & South Hemispheres) of the non thermal Universe and will provide a real breakthrough toward the understanding of the Extreme Universe at the highest energies never detected from Space. In this Severo Ochoa Seminar an overview of the JEM-EUSO Space Mission and the pathfinders currently being developed, EUSO-BALLOON of the French Space Agency (CNES) and MINI-EUSO (ISS) of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) will be presented. Moreover the Spanish Contribution to this EUSO Program under a Coordinated Proposal of MINECO, that involves Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aerospacial (INTA), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Univesidad de Leon (ULE) and Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) will be reviewed as well.

I will discuss recent development in low noise amplifiers for astrophysical applications.
I will describe the fundamental quantum limits of linear amplifiers and then I will show how a
promising new class of amplifiers - superconducting parametric amplifiers - might be able to  (apparently) violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

En esta charla se presenta una puesta al día de los resultados más importantes de un estudio arqueoastronómico interdisciplinar realizado en varias decenas de yacimientos arqueológicos de las culturas ibérica y tartesia del primer milenio a.C. en el levante y sur peninsular. En el caso de los templos tartésicos, posiblemente muy influidos o construidos por colonos fenicios, muestran un patrón de orientación muy bien definido que podría estar relacionado con el ocaso más meridional de Venus y, posiblemente, con el culto a la diosa fenicia Astarté, asociada a dicho planeta según los historiadores de la antigüedad. Por otra parte, encontramos que una fracción importante de los santuarios ibéricos estudiados, todos ellos dedicados a una diosa femenina, muestran marcadores del orto u ocaso solar sobre elementos destacados del horizonte en los equinoccios o una fecha muy cercana a estos, posiblemente el punto medio temporal entre solsticios. Esta relación astronómica equinoccial, la más clara de todas las encontradas en el mundo ibérico, sugiere la existencia de ritos asociados a la estacionalidad, festividades agrarias de la fecundidad similares a otras bien conocidas del Mediterráneo antiguo. La cronología más temprana de los santuarios relacionados con los equinoccios indican que comenzaron a funcionar alrededor de mediados del siglo IV a.C., momento de cambios importantes en la ideología de la sociedad ibérica y de un incremento de la influencia cartaginesa en la zona.

The Magellanic Clouds are the closest star forming galaxies, and their star formation histories can be derived in great details from color-magnitude diagrams reaching the oldest main sequence turnoffs. In the last several years, we have been conducting a wide research program on the Magellanic Clouds, including both photometry and spectroscopy, and have analysed the star formation history across both the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds. This has revealed the nature of the stellar population gradients of these galaxies, as well as signatures that can possibly be related to their interaction history, among them and with the Milky Way.

This paper discusses how cosmic gas accretion controls star formation, and summarizes the physical properties expected for the cosmic gas accreted by galaxies. The paper also collects observational evidence for gas accretion sustaining star formation. It reviews evidence inferred from neutral and ionized hydrogen, as well as from stars. A number of properties characterizing large samples of star-forming galaxies can be explained by metal-poor gas accretion, in particular, the relationship between stellar mass, metallicity, and star formation rate (the so-called fundamental metallicity relationship). They are put forward and analyzed. Theory predicts gas accretion to be particularly important at high redshift, so indications based on distant objects are reviewed, including the global star formation history of the universe, and the gas around galaxies as inferred from absorption features in the spectra of background sources.

Different components of galaxies are the result of internal and environmental processes during their lifetimes. Disentangling these processes is an important issue for understanding how galaxies form and evolve. In this context isolated galaxies provide a fruitful sample for exploring galaxies which have evolved mainly by internal processes (minimal merger/accretion/tidal effects). I will present the structural analysis performed as part of the AMIGA (Analysis of the interstellar Medium of Isolated GAlaxies; http://www.amiga.iaa.es) project. The analysis of the stellar mass-size relation of our spiral galaxies reveals a larger size for disks in low-density environments, as well as a dependence of disk size on the number of satellites. A 2D bulge/disk/bar decomposition of SDSS i-band images was performed in order to identify the pseudobulges in our sample. We derived (g-i) bulge colors and find a large fraction of pseudobulges in the red sequence of early-type galaxies. The bluer pseudobulges in our sample tend to be located in those galaxies more affected by tidal interactions. The properties of the majority of bulges in isolated galaxies suggest that pseudobulges formed most of their mass at an early epoch, and that specific environmental events may rejuvenate pseudobulges.

Evolved stars are factories of cosmic dust. This dust is made of tiny grains that are injected into the interstellar medium and plays a key role in the evolution of astronomical objects from galaxies to the embryos of planets. However, the processes involved in dust formation and evolution are still a mystery. The increased angular resolution of the new generation of telescopes will provide for the first time a detailed view of the conditions in the dust formation zone of evolved stars, as shown by our first observations with ALMA. The aim of the NANOCOSMOS project is to take advantage of these new observational capabilities to change our view on the origin and evolution of dust. We will combine astronomical observations, modelling, and top-level experiments to produce stardust analogues in the laboratory and identify the key species and steps that govern the formation of these nanoparticles. We will build two innovative setups: the Stardust chamber to simulate dust formation in the atmosphere of evolved stars, and the gas evolution chamber to identify novel molecules in the dust formation zone. We will also improve existing laboratory setups and combine different techniques to achieve original studies on individual nanoparticles, their processing to produce complex polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the chemical evolution of their precursors and their reactivity with abundant astronomical molecules. Our simulation chambers will be equipped with state-of-the-art in situ and ex situ diagnostics. Our astrophysical models, improved by the interplay between observations and laboratory studies, will provide powerful tools for the analysis of the wealth of data provided by the new generation of telescopes.

The synergy in NANOCOSMOS between astronomers, vacuum and microwave engineers, molecular and plasma physicists, surface scientists, including both experimentalists and theoreticians is the key to provide a cutting-edge view of cosmic dust.

One of the most widely researched topics in Extragalactic Astrophysics
in the last decades is how early-type galaxies have formed their stars
and assembled. In this context, we now have unequivocal observational
evidences about the existence of a numerous population of massive
galaxies which not only had assembled a considerable amount of stars
(~10^{^11} M_sun) by z~2, but were already evolving passively by that
time. These galaxies, the likely progenitors of nearby ellipticals,
are also quite compact in comparison with local galaxies of the same
mass. These result are mainly based on measurements designed to obtain
stellar masses and sizes, and our estimations of these parameters are
now quite robust. Now we need a more secure determination of how
exactly they formed and assembled their stellar mass in just 2-3 Gyr
(z>2). In other words, how was their Star Formation History and which
are the properties (age, metallicity, dust content) of their stellar
populations? And how could they end up with such high masses and small
sizes? In this talk, we will present our results about the SFH (mainly
ages and duty cycles) of massive galaxies at z=1-3 based on the
deepest spectro-photometric data ever taken. These data were gathered
by the Survey for High-z Absorption Red and Dead Sources (SHARDS), a
ESO/GTC Large Program aimed at obtaining R~50 optical spectra of
distant galaxies. This resolution is especially suited to measure
absorption indices such as D(4000), Mg_UV, the Balmer break,etc.. for
galaxies up to z~3 (merging our SHARDS data with HST/WFC3 grism
observations) or emission-line fluxes for faint targets up to
z~6. These measurements represent a big step forward for the robust
determination of the stellar population properties, providing a much
more certain characterization of the stellar content of distant
galaxies than the typical broad-band studies. Our results uniquely
allow to study the stellar content of red and dead galaxies at z~2 and
identify progenitors at higher redshifts, as well as helping to
constrain the models of galaxy formation.

Most massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres, and the masses of the black holes correlate with properties of the host-galaxy bulge component. These empirical scaling relations are important for distinguishing between various theoretical models of galaxy evolution, and they furthermore form the basis for all black-hole mass measurements at large distances. Observations have shown that the mass of the black hole is typically 0.1 per cent of the mass of the stellar bulge of the galaxy. Our spectroscopic survey with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope of 1000 nearby galaxies revealed several compact lenticular galaxies with extremely high velocity dispersions. The first example is NGC1277, which is a small, Re=1kpc, compact, lenticular galaxy with a mass of 1.2×10^11 solar masses. From the stellar kinematics we determined that the mass of the central black hole is 10^10 solar masses, more than 10 per cent of its bulge mass. I will present HST images and IFU spectroscopy of a dozen more compact galaxies that all appear to host extremely big black holes and have Salpeter-like IMFs. These local systems, with distances less than 100 Mpc, could be the passively evolved descendents of the quiescent compact nugget galaxies found at z~2 and the >10e9 Msun quasars that are found at z>6.