La mañana del 10 de mayo de 2022 se ha podido observar una gran prominencia solar. Durante 45 minutos, desde las 11.30 hasta las 12.15, se ha podido observar en el Sol una enorme prominencia en el limbo Suroeste que parecía estar a punto de entrar en erupción. Con el paso de los minutos se…
During the meeting on 2021, December 7, The ESO Council approved the MOSAIC construction agreement to be signed in March 2022 between ESO and CNRS (on behalf of MOSAIC). This is the green light for the MOSAIC preliminary design phase B until summer 2025.
Citizen science is a growing field that is generating new knowledge through the collaboration of citizens in scientific research. As this field expands it has started showing that it can be integrated into education in both formal and informal learning environments. In particular, the integration into education systems is creating new synergies as students acquire…
Imagine a movie that includes 50-100 pictures of the sky every single night. A snapshot of the sky brightness progress. That’s the idea behind the AZOTEA project The cameras of our collaborators monitor the night sky to serve our main research purpose: to study the light pollution evolution by measuring the brightness and color of…
This invited talk was the one that opened the congress, that was held at the Universidad Galileo in Guatemala City. Jesús Gallego reviewed our conception of the cosmos, since the beginning of humanity, the firmament has always attracted us as something distant and unreachable. From the sphere of fixed stars in the book “Del saber…
The efforts for spreading the Street Spectra project are more visible than ever. Thanks to the collaboration of the astronomy association “Astroguada” 8 schools have signed up to involve their students on the project. They gave us the opportunity of reaching all the students from ages 12 to 18. Each group got two different sessions…
This award represents the highest honor that the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) bestows upon individuals who, in the course of their lifetime, have contributed an extraordinary effort to light pollution abatement. Included in his many accomplishments, Jaime is a driving force of light pollution research in Europe with a clear focus on the promotion of…
A year and a half ago, Spain became one of the first countries to go into lockdown. A group of researchers from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, took this opportunity to study the variation of the brightness and color of the night sky in this period of time and used it to estimate the human contribution…
Text: Jaime Fernández, Photo: Alfredo Matilla Since the end of 2019, the Professor of Paleontology, Juan Luis Arsuaga, and the Professor of Astrophysics, Jesús Gallego, have been involved in a series of conferences (many of them online during the pandemic) in which they demand the need for a multidisciplinary discipline that investigates the origins of…
Up to 50cm (20 inches) of snow fell on the capital Madrid, last January the 8th & 9th. The record-breaking snowfall triggered some unprecedented scenes in Madrid. The low temperatures kept the snow and ice piled up across the capital for several days what triggered people to sky along Gran Vía street or had a…
An international team of astronomers has identified one of the rarest known classes of gamma-ray emitting galaxies, called BL Lacertae, within the first 2 billion years of the age of the Universe. The team, that has used one of the largest optical telescope in the world, Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), located at the Observatorio del…
The Festival for Art, Technology and Society “Ars Electronica” is an internationally platform for digital art and media culture that enjoys a worldwide reputation. This year’s edition took place from September the 9th to the 13th, and for the first time, it happened not only in Linz, but at 120 locations around the globe. 6…
Citizen science engage students in meaningful science research that addresses real world issues and leads to scientific advancement. We would like to invite school students to contribute to one particular project. We intend to generate awareness about the problem of light pollution in general, and the consequences of the global switch out of the older…
These days has finished the installation of a brand-new ISO7 clean room at our LICA laboratory. The new facility will allow the manipulation and characterization of high-tech devices that need such level of cleaning. Specifically, LICA is now fully qualified for the work with scientific-level detectors, optical components, and complex instrumental setups. The LICA clean…
Light pollution was believed could only be measured with photometers from the ground, but a new research published in Scientific Reports (Nature group) has proven that it is also detectable from space. Satellites detect diffused light in unlighted areas outside cities. Until now these detections were attributed to an instrumental effect but the study shows that this…
As millions across the globe are having to self-isolate to prevent the spread of coronavirus astronomical observation activities are reduced to those we can carry out from our home with instrumentation we happen to have with us. The lockdown is an exceptional opportunity to measure the effects of the decrease in human activity on the…
The III Congreso ProAm de la Sociedad Española de Astronomía was a meeting point between the community of professional astronomers and the very active community of astronomy enthusiasts in Spain.Our researchers have attended this conference in order to present Street Spectra with a poster describing the motivation being the change in technology lighting is suffering around the…
The ActiON pilot project Street Spectra has recently set up an ad hoc new website that serves as a resource for information related to the project. Explore https://streetspectra.actionproject.eu and browse through all the new interesting materials! The home screen offers links to the epicollect5 app from both the Apple store and Google play. It also…
The ActiON pilot project Street Spectra has recently set up an ad hoc new website that serves as a resource for information related to the project. https://streetspectra.actionproject.eu Explore the website and browse through all the new interesting materials! The home screen offers links to the epicollect5 app from both the Apple store and Google play.…
This didactic unit on the Cities at Night citizen science project aims to generate social awareness about the problem of light pollution, bring scientific research closer to schools and of course encourage young people to participate in the project. This teaching material will allow you to work in the classroom with high school students with…
The UB, IAUNAM and UCM co-organize the The Milky Way Gaia school on “Milky Way size galaxy formation and high performance computing” that is taking place between Jan. 14-17 2020 in Barcelona. The objective of the school and working group behind it is the exploitation of Gaia data in combination with other survey data to…
GUAIX member Cristina Cabello attended the J-PAS RIA Workshop: ‘The Universe in 56 colours: science with the first J-PAS data’ held in Teruel from 2 to 4 December, and gave a talk entitled Studying the properties of low-mass galaxies at z ∼1. How can J-PAS be useful here? This research surveys the Extended Groth Strip…
The regional government of the Comunidad de Madrid has awarded two research projects for Young Researchers to GUAIX members Dr. Bililign T. Dullo and Dr. Santi Roca-Fàbrega, both Captación de Talento fellows in the group. The amount awarded is over 90 k€ to support their research on the process that drive galaxy formation, from the…
GUAIX member Dr. Sergio Pascual and Dr. Eva Besadas visited the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters in Garching to attend the Instrument Control Systems Seminar for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). The participation in this seminar is a further step in the effort being made by the GUAIX group to be at the head of…
ACTION is looking for new and ongoing citizen science projects related to any form of pollution in Europe and worldwide. Successful applicants will receive €20,000 to help deliver a six-month pilot with the help of the ACTION team. The funding can be spent on salaries, equipment, consumables, travel, subcontracting to other entities, and indirect expenditure…
The researchers Sara Cazzoli and Laura Hermosa have visited this week the department of Earth Physics and Astrophysics, for a scientific collaboration involving IFU data from the new MEGARA instrument with professors Africa Castillo and Armando Gil de Paz. Dr. Sara Cazzoli is researcher at the IAA (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía) and she was…
“The nuclear activity and central structure of the elliptical galaxy NGC 5322” Bil Dullo attended the ‘SKA in Spain’ meeting at Granada this week with a talk about “The nuclear activity and central structure of the elliptical galaxy NGC 5322”. His contribution showcased best strategies to exploit synergies from a large sample of high-resolution, multi-wavelength data, including from HST (optical and infrared) and…
Are you a researcher interested in carrying out your research in Madrid? The GUAIX Group is interested in supporting your application to the MSCA Individual Fellowships Calls. Our group can provide support in the preparation phase of the MSCA-IF grants. GUAIX coordinates the efforts and activities of UCM researchers in the following fields: Development and…
ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons visits the Faculty of Physical Sciences Xavier Barcons visited the Complutense University on Friday 5 April, invited by IPARCOS and he gave a talk, entitled ESO: Building and operating the most powerful ground-based telescopes. Barcons explained to a room full of researchers and students how is the day to day…
On January 21, the Faculty of Physics hosted the presentation day of IPARCOS (Instituto de Física de PARtículas y del COSmos), an institute that, according to its current director, Fernando Arqueros, “works in particle physics as well as astrophysics, cosmology and advanced instrumentation and applications”. The GUAIX Group is one of the five groups…
Dr. Bililign Dullo, member of the GUAIX group, in collaboration with other researchers of the group published in the prestigious journal ApJ an article about the spiral galaxy NGC 7025. Disky bulges in spiral galaxies are commonly thought to form out of disk materials (mainly) via bar-driven secular processes. They are structurally and dynamically…
The international scientific colloquium “Spectroscopic Surveys with the ELT: A Gigantic Step into the Deep Universe” took place from 17 to 20 October 2017 at the Palacio de Congresos in Toledo (Spain). The meeting was organized by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) with the support of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) and…
