GUAIX

A HST/WFC3 Multi-cycle Treasury Program, led by Sandy Faber, has been awarded to the AEGIS collaboration. We will now be able to add a chunk of high-resolution, supremely sensitive J and H band imaging and ACS parallels to the fantastic existing sets of data in our favorite regions of sky, including the EGS. In Groth, this will amount to a contiguous region of 3x15 WFC3 tiles or about 200 sq arcmins.

More info can be found at the HST Multi-cycle Treasury Program web page

Milia 0.3.0 and Pymilia 0.3.0 are now available for download.

Milia is a C++ library created to compute cosmological ages and distances in the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric. Pymilia is a python package containing python wrappers for milia.

A tragic accident has taken Dr. Kurt Birkle, former director of Calar Alto Observatory, away from us.

We are very sad and specially those GUAIX members which carried out the UCM Survey whose observations were taken with the Calar Alto Schmidt telescope. We remember his careful and detailed explanations for baking the photographic plates, for loading the chassis, for focussing the telescope, for the guiding and for the plate processing. He was a necessary contributor to the success of the UCM Survey.

Some GUAIX members joint top level astronomers (Sandy Faber, David Koo and Giovanni Fazio) for this family photo taken at Toledo during last AEGIS Meeting.

More pictures at image gallery

Los prof. Giovanni G. Fazio (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Jiasheng Huang (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, SAO), prof. David C. Koo (U. California Observatories/Lick Observatory) y Eiichi Egami (Dept. of Astronomy and Steward Observatory, University of Arizona) están de visita en la UCM tras la reunión del grupo AEGIS en Toledo. Más fotos en la galería de imágenes

GUAIX members Raffaella Marino and Lucía Rodríguez have presented the results of their master thesis. These research works are the final phase of the Master in Astrophysics and a necessary step before the PD Thesis.

From 20th to 23rd of October 2009, the III Consolider-GTC meeting was held in the thousand-year-old city of Cádiz. Nearly 100 project members assisted the encounter in the Hotel Atlántico - Parador de Cádiz. The meeting, funded by the CONSOLIDER INGENIO-2010 program of the MICINN, allowed the project members to expose and discuss the proposals and projects related to the scientific exploitation of the Spanish 10m telescope GTC, as well as to enable collaborations between different research groups inside the project. More information here.

GUAIX member Carmen Eliche has attended to the conference held in Malta from October 19th-21st, 2009. Nearly 200 astrophysicists have confered, discussed, and transfered their knowledge on faint, dust-obscured, or dark components of galaxies during this week. The state-of-the-art cosmological simulations on galaxy formation were shown by their developers, as well as different, exotic theories on AGN radio modes or on binary super massive black holes that are coalescencing. Even the doubts of certain scientists on the existence of dark matter (thought to represent more than 90% of the total matter in the Universe) appeared during the discussion sessions. We presented a poster on numerical simulations, proving that some inner disks and rings in galaxies could have been formed through minor mergers. For a low-resolution version of the poster, click here.

From september 23rd to 25th, UCM hosted the II Astronomical instrumentation Workshop organized by ASTRID and The Astronomy Infraestructures Network (RIA). The goal of this workshop was to gather the scientific teams and the industries of the sector to expose their needs and projects, and share experiences. The workshop was aimed as well at serving as an echo to convince financing agencies and the astronomical community in general of the need to promote with decision the development of astrophysical instrumentation and the tools for the analysis of related data. The formation and acknowledgement of instrumentation astronomers will be a key factor for Spain to meet the requirements of its position in Astronomy in the next decades. See the ASTRID projet web page at http://www.astrid-cm.org/ for more details. For a summary visit the weblog "cuaderno de bitácora estelar" at http://weblogs.madrimasd.org/astrofisica/archive/2009/09/25/125429.aspx