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 discovery was made with the JST250 telescope and the JPCam camera of the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory.
The scientific team of the Centro de Estudios del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) has discovered a new supernova, which would be located almost 700 million light-years from Earth. This stellar explosion is the first to be detected with the JST250 telescope since the start of JPCam's scientific operations. The supernova has already been registered by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
This composition of 20 images of what are known as tidal star streams became NASA's APOD (Astronomical Picture of the Day) for 27 September. An image that is translated into 20 languages and with an audience of millions of people around the world. The image by David Martínez, researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA), is part of his Stellar Stream Legacy Survey project that studies stellar streams.
In this case, each frame is a composite view, composed of publicly available images of the galaxies' surroundings, to which the coloured image of the central massive galaxy is added. They show faint cosmic structures, streams hundreds of thousands of light years across.
Three works started by a group of scientist at the time they were at Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) show that the strength of gravity on cosmic scales is that predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Furthermore, these scientists have solved the missing baryon problem, i.e. the majority of the matter comprising planets, stars, and living beings was missing; they detect that this matter is in the form of hot gas and fills the space between galaxies.
CEFCA announces worldwide open access to the Early Data Release (EDR) of the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey. This EDR consists of 18 J-PLUS pointings at different locations of the sky, observed in the twelve J-PLUS photometric optical bands, overall amounting to 36deg2. We provide access to the J-PLUS catalogues with photometric data in all the twelve bands for more than 400.000 astronomical objects, together with the actual FITS images and proper masks to avoid bright stars and other undesired areas.
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.
A quick method for making accurate, virtual universes to help understand the effects of dark matter and dark energy has been developed by CEFCA and UCL scientists. Making up 95% of our universe, these substances have profound effects on the birth and lives of galaxies and stars and yet almost nothing is known about their physical nature.
After an intense period of fine tuning and optimization tasks developed by the OAJ/CEFCA Team, systematic observations with T80Cam@JAST80 have started. The telescope–camera system is in optimal performance, reaching normally seeing-limited images. So far, a best gaussian FWHM of 0.63”(+/-0.09”) over the 2deg2 focal plane of T80Cam has been recorded.
By using the best available measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the Planck satellite, Dr. Carlos Hernández Monteagudo from the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA) and his collaborators have detected vast amounts of hidden baryonic matter around middle-size galaxies in the local universe. To arrive at this new result, the team has used the latest Planck data release and data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
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.