Severo Ochoa Programme

Research News

  • Distribution of red luminous galaxies and the corresponding cosmic web at redshift 0.4-0.7 using 10 redshift snapshots to describe the cosmic evolution in the computations (left panel; galaxies and the underlying cosmic web in red and grey, respectively). The primordial density fluctuations at redshift 100 are shown in the right panel. It is shown how the survey mask and radial selection effects are considered and the whole volume in the box is sampled with Bayesian models.
    Research news
    Efficient Bayesian inference of the evolving cosmic web from galaxy surveys
    We present COSMIC BIRTH (COSMological Initial Conditions from Bayesian Inference Reconstructions with THeoretical models): an algorithm to reconstruct the primordial and evolved cosmic density fields from galaxy surveys on the light-cone. The displacement and peculiar velocity fields are obtained from forward modelling at different redshift snapshots given some initial cosmic density field within a Gibbs-sampling scheme. This allows us to map galaxies, observed in a light-cone, to a single high redshift and hereby provide tracers and the corresponding survey completeness in Lagrangian space
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  • Artistic impression of the surface of Gliese 486 b. Credit: RenderArea.
    Research news
    A nearby transiting rocky exoplanet that is suitable for atmospheric investigation
    We detect a transiting rocky planet with an orbital period of 1.467 days around the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 486. The planet Gliese 486 b is 2.81 Earth masses and 1.31 Earth radii, a composition similar to that of Venus or Earth, as determined from exquisite radial velocity data and photometric light curves. The host star is at a distance of 26 light-years, very bright, and observable from both hemispheres of Earth. The stellar and planet properties indicate that despite the hot surface temperatures it is possible that the planet conserved part of its original atmosphere, making it an
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  • Artist's impression of the atmosphere of Gliese 486b. Credit: RenderArea
    Press release
    A super-Earth is discovered which can be used to test planetary atmosphere models
    During the past 25 years astronomers have discovered a wide variety of exoplanets, made of rock, ice and gas, thanks to the construction of astronomical instruments designed specifically for planet searches. Also, using a combination of different observing techniques they have been able to determine a large numher of masses, sizes, and hence densities of the planets, which helps them to estimate their internal composition and raising the number of planets which have been discovered outside the Solar System.
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  • Omaira González Martín
    Interview
    OMAIRA GONZÁLEZ MARTÍN: “The Canary Observatories have been essential in the advance of the study of nuclear activity in galaxies”
    For astronomers one of the biggest obstacles is the darkness of the Universe itself, above all the darkness caused by the gas and dust which surround active galactic nuclei, or AGN. These nuclei emit a huge quantity of energy produced by the supermassive black hole onto which matter falls at a considerable rate. The accretion processes are fundamental for the evolution of active galaxies. However these nuclei often remain hidden by the dusty structures, called tori, which surround the central black hole. Studyuing the properties of this circumnuclear dust, the accretion processes, and
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  • Spectral energy distribution (in white; best theoretical fit in blue) of an extremely red old star. The photometric data from Spitzer's IRAC and MIPS instruments are represented in purple. Credits: Dell'Agli et al. (2021) with background infrared image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, NASA/JPL-Caltech/Meixner(STSCI) and the Sage Legacy Team.
    Research news
    Post-common envelope binaries as the precursors of extremely red old stars
    Modelling dust formation in single stars evolving through the carbon-star stage of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) (i.e., the late evolutionary stages of Sun-like stars) reproduces reasonably well the mid-infrared colours and magnitudes of most of the C-rich sources in low-metallicity galaxies with known distances like the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The only exception to this is a small subset of extremely red objects (EROs). An analysis of the spectral energy distributions of EROs suggests the presence of large quantities of dust, which demand gas densities in the outflow significantly
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  • High-resolution images of the bright boulders (arrows) during Hayabusa2 proximity operations. Especially, the images obtained during the first touchdown operation (a-c) show much smaller bright fragments in regolith everywhere (adapted from Fig.1 in Tatsumi et al. 2021).
    Research news
    Collision of C-type Ryugu’s parent body with a rocky object
    Hayabusa2’s optical navigation camera (ONC) found many anomalously bright boulders on the dark surface of the carbonaceous (or C-type) asteroid Ryugu. Observations with ONC and the near-infrared spectrometer (NIRS3) indicates that at least six of those bright boulders exhibit reflectance spectra consistent with exogenous origin; their spectra are similar to rocky (or S-type) asteroids. This means that the bright boulders resulted from collisional mixing between Ryugu’s parent body and S-type asteroid(s). On Bennu, the asteroid explored by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, bright boulders with spectra
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