Last November some friends of the new Sydney on-line magazine A-star, Ryan Wittingslow and Harry Simpson, visited Siding Spring Observatory (Coonabarabran, NSW) to prepare a documentary about Astronomy and the telescopes at site. This is the nice video they have released, entitled Space is just totally big and amazing:
As it happened while I was supporting astronomical observations at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), I was interviewed as part of the video. Although I talked about some few things (my research, my job at the AAO and my times as a young amateur astronomer in Spain), they only used my comments about astrophotography. Indeed, they asked me to include some scenes of my astronomical time-lapses on the documentary, and I think the result is great. I really love to see my astro photos and videos so well used. Thanks Ryan and Harry for this report!
DPESPAÑOL: Esta historia entra en la categoría “Doble Post” donde indico artículos que han sido escritos tanto en español en El Lobo Rayado como en inglés en The Lined Wolf.
DPENGLISH: This story belongs to the series “Double Post” which indicates posts that have been written both in English in The Lined Wolf and in Spanish in El Lobo Rayado.
My friend Rubén García-Benito (IAA-CSIC) has prepared the following “teaser” of the CALIFA DR3, which uses a 3D movie he has prepared using the CALIFA data. The teaser, entitled “CALIFA: City of Light”, is available in Youtube and in YouKu (for Chinese astronomers):
“CALIFA: City of Light”, teaser announcing the release of CALIFA DR3 in April 2016, that will make publish the 3D data of 600 galaxies observed for this survey. Credit: Rubén García-Benito (IAA-CSIC)
I think it is a quite original idea for giving a bit of extra publicity to the CALIFA DR3, don’t you think so?
DPENGLISH: This story belongs to the series “Double Post” which indicates posts that have been written both in English in The Lined Wolf and in Spanish in El Lobo Rayado.
DPESPAÑOL: Esta historia entra en la categoría “Doble Post” donde indico artículos que han sido escritos tanto en español en El Lobo Rayado como en inglés en The Lined Wolf.
Last month the prestigious journal Nature published a letter led by PhD student (and friend) Louise Howes (@Lousie, ANU/RSAA, Australia). This scientific paper, with title Extremely metal-poor stars from the cosmic dawn in the bulge of the Milky Way, uses data from the 1.2m Skymapper Telescope, the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (both at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia) and the 6.5m Magellan Clay telescope (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile) to study very old stars in the Milky Way bulge.
Image of the Galactic centre obtained using Skymapper data. Credit: Chris Owen (ANU/RSAA).
The aim of the research was to look for signatures of really old stars: stars that old that perhaps the Milky Was was not even born when they were created! How do astronomers know that? Just studying the chemical composition of the stars via deep spectral analysis. Only hydrogen and helium (and just a bit of litium) were formed in the Big Bang: the rest of elements have been created or inside the stars (oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron) or because of processes happening to the stars (e.g., supernova explosions, that create heavy elements such as gold, silver, copper or uranium). As time goes by and new generations of stars are born, the amount of metals (for astronomers, metals are all elements which are not hydrogen and helium) increases. Therefore if we discover a star with very few amount of metals, we will quite sure we are observing a very old object.
Loiuse has been using the 2dF instrument at the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the MIKE spectrograph at the Magellan Clay Telescope (Chile) to get deep, high-resolution spectra of candidate old stars in the Galactic bulge. The candidate stars were identified using optical images provided by the 1.2m Skymapper Telescope. With these observations, Louise Howes and collaborators have detected 23 stars that are extremely metal-poor. These stars have surprisingly low levels of carbon, iron and other heavy elements. Indeed, they report the discovery of a star that has an abundance of iron which is 10,000 times lower than that found in the Sun! These stars were formed at redshift greater than 15, that is, we are observing in our own Milky Way stars that were formed just ~300 million years after the Big Bang!
On top of that, the study suggests that these first stars didn’t explode as normal supernova but as hypernova: poorly understood explosions of probably rapidly rotating stars producing 10 times as much energy as normal supernovae. The high-resolution spectroscopic data have been also used to study the kinematics of these very old stars, that are found on tight orbits around the Galactic centre rather that being halo stars passing through the bulge. This is also characteristic of stars that were formed at redshifts greater than 15.
Short 3 minutes video discussing the results found in this study. Credit: ANU.
I’m happy to say here that I’ve been the support astronomer for many of her nights at the AAT the last couple of years. And I’m extremely happy to see that, even because of the bad weather we have had sometimes, they managed to get these observations published in Nature! Well done, Louise!
This week I’m back at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT, Siding Spring Observatory) as support astronomer. As the same time I’m helping visitors astronomer to get the best data using the 2dF instrument, I’m taking time-lapse sequences of the night sky using 2 CANON EOS 5D Mark III cameras. This afternoon, when checking the “preliminary” sequences of the previous night, I discovered a bright meteor in one of the frames. I was excited because at the beginning I thought it was a Leonid, but I checked and it seems to be a sporadic meteor or, perhaps, a meteor from the South Taurids shower.
The circumpolar Southern Sky, with the Magellanic Clouds, the Southern Cross and the Pointers (Alpha and Beta Centauri) over the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), at Siding Spring Observatory (NSW, Australia). A bright meteor crosses the sky. Although it could have been a meteor of the Leonids meteor shower, the radiant (point in the sky from where the meteors of a meteor shower come from) was not in the sky. However it could be a meteor from the South Taurids shower. Photo taken at 2am AEST (UT+11) of the 17 Nov 2015 with a CANON EOS5D using a 16 mm lens at f2.8, 3200 ISO, 30 seconds exposure. Click here to get a higher resolution image. Credit: Ángel R. López-Sánchez (AAO/MQ).
A reddish-greenish sky glow is also seen in the image. This glow has been also observed from the observatories in Chile as is consequence of chemical reactions involving oxygen (green colours, usually forming ozone) and nitrogen (red colours) molecules in our atmosphere. These chemical reactions are induced by ultraviolet emission from the Sun, which is much more intense when the solar cycle is in maximum, as it has been in the last few years.
On Friday 21st August 2015, during the Australian National Science Week, the AAO and Centennial Parklands organized a public stargazing event in Centennial Park in Sydney. This event was part of an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the “Most People Stargazing across Multiples sites in a Country,” organized by Mt Stromlo Observatory, RSAA/ANU, Canberra.
I helped in the organization of the event jointly organized by the Australian Astronomical Observatory and Centennial Parklands at Centennial Park. During a 10 minute period between 8:30 and 8:40 pm, 400 participants used small telescopes and binoculars to look at various objects in the night sky. I also prepared this time-lapse video, which compiles 2500 photos taken between 6pm and 9:30pm, shows people assembling in the field to listen to presentations by Prof. Fred Watson and Dr. Amanda Bauer before the official stargazing event began. A timeline of events are included in the video.
Time-lapse video of the Stargazing event jointly organized by the Australian Astronomical Observatory and Centennial Parklands at Centennial Park with the aim of break the Guinness World Record for the “Most People Stargazing across Multiples sites in a Country. The video compiles 2500 photos taken every 5 seconds between 6pm and 9:30pm. A Full HD version of the video is available in the AAO YouTube Channel.Credit of the video: Ángel R. López-Sánchez (AAO/MQ); Credit of the music: “Space Guardians”, by Fran Soto, Epic Soul Factory.
In total, 37 sites across Australia participated in achieving the Guinness Record World, including 7960 individual stargazers. The Guinness World Record for the “Most People Stargazing across Multiples sites in a Country” was confirmed on 15th October 2015. Congratulations to all involved!
A/Prof. Ángel R. López-Sánchez 