The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ) is a new Spanish
astronomical facility particularly conceived for carrying out large sky
surveys, making use of two unprecedented telescopes of unusually large
fields of view (FoV): the JST/T250, a 2.55 m telescope of 3 deg FoV, and
the JAST/T80, an 83 cm telescope of 2 deg FoV. After two years of
project development, JAST/T80 is already installed at the OAJ undergoing
the first performance tests, and JST/T250 is fully assembled in the
factory awaiting for the completion of the optics. We here provide an
overall description of the project,…
The stellar metallicity distribution of stars can be a very useful tool
to constrain the chemical evolution models reproducing different
formation scenarios for the Galactic bulge. However, classical
spectroscopy of individual stars is observationally expensive, and the
surveys done so far have been unsuccessful due to the low number
statistics. Recently, the advent of tunable filter tomography has opened
a new way to obtain low-resolution spectroscopy of large samples of
stars. We present preliminary results on an on-going study to measure
the stellar metallicity at two different locations…
T Pyxidis is a recurrent nova which underwent explosions at semi-regular
intervals of about 22 years between 1890 and 1966. On the 14th Apr 2011,
it started its sixth (long overdue) known outburst. In this talk, I
present a multi-site campaign aimed at the follow-up of this object in
the optical regime with intermediate resolution spectroscopy and I
summarize some of our findings which challenge some of the common
understandings of novae. Our observations may actually imply that the
two populations of novae (Fe II and He/N) suggested by te{wms92} are,
in fact, a byproduct of the speed…
Quasars belong to the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Physical
processes at the origin of them can be explained in the framework of the AGN unified scenario. The unified scenario predicts two classes of
quasars, obscured and unobscured ones, depending on the orientation of
the dusty torus which surrounds the central supermassive black hole.
Variability is ubiquitous in AGN, and may be generated by several
phenomena that would produce different footprints. Determining the
nature and origin of the variability is a key subject to understand the
differences between the different types of AGNs.
The OTELO project is the extragalactic survey currently under way using
the tunable filters of the OSIRIS instrument at the GTC. OTELO is
already providing the deepest emission line object survey of the
universe up to a redshift 7. In this contribution, the status of the
survey and the first results obtained will be presented.
