With a little help from our friends: Finding a home for E-ELT March 4, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 2comments
Cerro Paranal (middle right) and Cerro Armazones (middle left)
ESO announced today that their Council have recommended Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes as the preferred site for their next generation optical/IR observatory, the 42-m European Extremely Large Telescope. The decision came in response to the delivery of a technical report by the organisation’s E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee, from which Armazones emerged as the frontrunner, “because it has the best balance of sky quality across all aspects and it can be operated in an integrated fashion with the existing ESO Paranal Observatory”.
So does this means the deal is done? Apparently not. The text also tells us that ESO have received proposals to host the telescope from both Spain, who would like to see the telescope site on La Palma, and Chile, so a final run-off between these two countries now seems likely.
What has struck me about this whole site selection exercise is the different approaches taken by ESO for the E-ELT and their North American counterparts, the Thirty Meter Telescope project.
Astronomy and the Chile earthquake March 2, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, geology . Add a comment
Pretty Valaparaiso in 2005
I noticed a lot of traffic to the blog today from google searches for people looking for info on the fate of the telescopes in Chile after last weekend’s huge earthquake that has devastated the central part of the country. The bottom line is that they all seem to be fine – although let’s not forget that the damage to Chile’s infrastructure could easily pay for hundreds of VLTs. As for the lives lost, well, no hardware can replace those.
On a personal note, my only experience of earthquakes dates back to 2005, while observing at Gemini South at Cerro Pachon, near La Serena in Chile. In our week-long observing run we suffered 2 earthquakes of magnitudes 5.8 and 5.0 or so, if I remember correctly. Our telescope operator, recognising the distant rumble, gave us a few seconds’ warning that a quake was under way, giving me ample time to freak out completely. Having just escaped the London bombings a few weeks earlier, I guess my nerves were pretty shot, but it was still pretty scary. I can only imagine how terrifying a magnitude 8+ quake must be when you’re sound asleep in your home at 3 am and I truly hope I never get to find out.
Anyway, here’s a round-up of some of the statements released by the astronomy organisations with bases in the country.
On Software in Astronomy March 1, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy . 4comments
Importance of the Hubble archive. The number of archival papers has exceeded the number of PI-led papers since 2006 (from White et al., 2009)
I’ve been giving some thought to software development in astronomy, which is a difficult topic. All astronomers agree that good data processing, and hence good software, is crucial to doing rigorous science. To interpret observational data, to translate electrons on a detector to scientific knowledge, requires a solid understanding of the instrument, the observing conditions, and of the exact process with which the data were treated. Many large ground- and space-based observatories, like those run by ESO, Gemini and NASA, strive to provide the community with “science-ready” data. This means that the data are processed to remove all instrumental signatures, allowing astronomers to dive straight into the analysis.
The rationale is that providing science-ready data essentially makes them usable by a much wider community than those involved in the observing campaign, or those used to working with a given instrument. Indeed, a big driver behind the global Virtual Observatory initiative is the “democratisation of astronomy” by providing anyone in the world with ready-to-use astronomical data, irrespective of their location or affiliation to large organisations.
Shape matters in black hole growth January 31, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, new astronomy . 2comments
Fig. 1 (from Schawinski et al., 2010)
Active galaxies have gone by many names: active galactic nuclei, quasars, QSOs, Seyfert galaxies, radio galaxies. Astronomers used to think these were all distinct types of objects, unified by the observation of large amounts of energy emerging from a compact region at the centre of the galaxy. These days, despite a great variety in observational characteristics, active galaxies’ engines are generally thought to be driven by a single mechanism, the accretion of material onto a supermassive central black hole.
In a paper published to the Arxiv last week, Kevin Schawinski and collaborators have used Galaxy Zoo classifications of local Universe galaxies to show that active elliptical galaxies are markedly different from those with a more disk-like or spiral shapes, adding morphology as an additional factor to consider in our model of active galaxies.
The Astronomer’s Mating Call January 28, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, politics . 1 comment so far
Every winter is the time for an age-old mating ritual that takes place in the astronomy community: a special courtship dance where graduate students and postdocs parade round, flashing their colourful feathers, trying to appear smarter and savvier than their peers in the desperate quest for a new mecenas who will support their addiction to MacBooks and airmiles. It’s jobs season, when the friendships we’ve cherished for the past year become meaningless and it’s each astronomer to their own.
