A binocular telescope like the one that will be launched on a satellite into space in 2030 will arrive at the Aragonese observatory in the coming weeks. The ARRAKIHS mission will take images from Pico del Buitre for at least the next two years. They will be used to improve all data processing and analysis and to refine the observational strategy in a team led by Dr Antonio Marín-Franch. The goal is to observe nearby galaxies at unprecedented depths in search of the stellar trails predicted by the standard cosmological model and which have so far proved elusive.
Yale University, in coordination with the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, has announced that the Gruber Cosmology Prize of 2018 is for all the "Planck" mission team of the European Space Agency, and specially for its scientific leaders, N. Mandolesi and J.-L Puget. Two CEFCA scientists, from the Research Group "Astrophysics with Large Surveys" of the Government of Aragón, have been members of the Planck mission and have been awarded as co-participants.
A collaboration agreement between the Euclid Consortium of the European Space Agency (ESA)-led space mission Euclid- and the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA; Teruel) has been signed for the provision of ground based scientific data with the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre to complement the observations of the Euclid space telescope.
The complete catalog of ALHAMBRA project will be published tomorrow. It consists on a mapping of the space to study the evolution of the universe over the last ten billion years. ALHAMBRA has identified, classified and calculated the distance of more than half a million galaxies spread over eight regions of the sky. The development of this catalog has been performed by the Observatorio de Calar Alto with the collaboration of researchers of the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón.
As the ALHAMBRA project maps in detail eight deep separate regions of the universe, it is the best available tool to study the recent history of the universe. This first release of the data, which is called ALHAMBRA-gold, contains one hundred thousand galaxies, twenty thousand stars and one thousand possible active galactic nuclei. Several researchers of CEFCA have participated in the development of this catalogue, which has been conducted by the Calar Alto Observatory.
On March 21, the Planck scientific team released the first set of cosmology results based on data obtained during the first 15.5 months of the Space Telescope's operation. This has been done be means of almost thirty scientific articles in which the Cosmology group of CEFCA has been involved.