Ara Story

Scritto il 13 Mag 2013 alle 14:35 in Gallery

Foto dal glorioso passato dell’ARA ottenute da soci ed ex-soci di vecchia data.

The Observatorio Astrofsico de Javalambre: current status and future developments

Scritto il 30 Apr 2013 alle 01:39 in Pubblicazioni

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,…

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Tunable filter absorption line spectroscopy of the Galactic bar. Metallicity gradients

Scritto il 30 Apr 2013 alle 01:39 in Pubblicazioni

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…

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T Pyx: towards a new paradigm for nova explosions

Scritto il 30 Apr 2013 alle 01:39 in Pubblicazioni

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…

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