The first images from J-ALFIN reveal emission so faint it had previously escaped detection —spectacular views that redefine nebulae like Abell 21, as shown in the image accompanying this news. These are the first results from one of the legacy projects being carried out with the JAST80 telescope at the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory.

A new research study presents a method to obtain images that trace the Hα (H-alpha) emission of nearby galaxies in an automated and precise way. These maps show the areas where new stars are forming and visualize their distribution across galaxies, revealing differences by location and galaxy mass. This automated method will enable the detailed study of thousands of galaxies in the local universe.

CEFCA astrophysicists link internationally significant projects, such as Gaia, a census of 2 billion stars in the Milky Way, and the Vera Rubin telescope in the Chilean desert, with research based on data from the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory. Their latest advances are being presented at the European Astronomical Society forum, which is being held until Friday in Cork (Ireland) and brings together 1,500 researchers from 60 countries.

The ARRAKIHS space mission selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) and led by Spain, starts its scientific preparation period at the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory (OAJ), in the province of Teruel. This milestone is a fundamental step towards the launch of the mission planned for 2030, which will study the formation process of galaxies such as the Milky Way, including the role of dark matter.

A scientist team have managed to measure the size of galaxies with the same model, accessible on the web, that many users classify everyday photos or videos. This team has used it, however, to identify the ‘edges’ of galaxies, the truncation where stars stop forming. This is the first time this model has been used in astrophysics and the next step will be to apply it to the observations of EUCLID, one of the European Space Agency's key missions.

The European Space Agency's Euclid mission has published the first batch of data from its mapping, including a preview of its deep fields. Among the results, 26 million galaxies have been detected. The scientific results are described in 27 scientific publications. Jesús Vega, an astrophysicist at CEFCA, has contributed to two of them. Both focus on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms for data exploration. Specifically, to create a catalogue of galaxies and to develop an AI model that learns from the images themselves. In addition, Moham-mad Akhlaghi signs one of the technical papers.

A study provides new insights into one of the mechanisms that would allow the cosmic web to influence the evolution of galaxy clusters. The large-scale structure of the universe would act as a cage that regulates the gaseous ecosystem around galaxy clusters. A paper by Stefano Zarattini, researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA), points to the distance between clusters and filaments as a determining factor.

Observations for surveying the Universe have revealed the first supernova found during the J-PAS project. The CEFCA scientific team located it in a spiral galaxy, like the Milky Way, at a distance of about 700 million light years. Its discovery has already been reported to the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

An algorithm developed by researcher Andrés del Pino now applies Bayesian neural networks to data from the J-PLUS project. The aim is to robustly classify the astronomical objects detected by the survey and thus differentiate stars, quasars and galaxies. The research has been published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The first survey data show 100 000 stars and about 450 000 galaxies. It is the first scientific demonstration of the power of the combination of the JST250 wide-field telescope and its JPCam panoramic camera. J-PAS, led by the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Spain, makes available to the scientific community the first 12 square degrees of the three-dimensional map of the universe that it is carrying out from the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre.ars.

The OAJ and Galáctica have been two of the places chosen to tell the story of Aragonese culture and contributions to astronomy throughout history.

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.

The Point Spread Function (PSF) quantifies the distribution of light scattered by the combined effects of the atmosphere, telescope, and instrument. Most research to date has focused on the central few arcseconds of the PSF. However, extending this analysis to several arcminutes would enable the removal of scattered light produced by dominant stars, which often obscure astrophysical sources. This issue was highlighted by a team of CEFCA researchers at the latest meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society. The extent to which light can be scattered from an astronomical source is illustrated by the "blue sky" effect. In optical observations, the PSF provides a quantitative measure of this scattering. While most surveys consider only the core region of the PSF (a few arcseconds), this narrow focus limits the ability to remove scattered light from bright sources. Such light dominates the image and interferes with the observation of fainter astrophysical features.

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.

The belt of transneptunian objects holds four dwarf planets including Haumea which is unusual for its elongated and fast-rotating body.

A stellar occultation has allowed to determine the main physical characteristics of this body, unknown until now, including the discovery of a ring.

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.