Trip to Chile - 1) La Serena

Now... Saturday afternoon, after resting for more than 8 hours, I can post something more useful and make the scratch from last night turn into a poster.

I came to CTIO Headquarters on Friday afernoon and met Stephen Heathcote (big boss here) and Kepler Oliveira, a brazilian friend and a pretty good astronomer. I sat around, worked on my talk and stayed for a remote observation session at SOAR telescope last night. What a program!!! They were following the star HD221226, with three 20 min. exposure, then a calibration star was targeted and back to the same object again.

Then I left to work on my Monday morning talk on the SZ effect and, after 3h00 AM I went "home".

What is amazing about it? The most interesting thing is that, through a teleconference and 3 or 4 internet connections to SOAR, people at La Serena (CTIO Headquarters), Cerro Pachon (SOAR site) and University of Michigan could simultaneously follow - and even control - the observations. It was just not possible 5 years ago. Now, we can chat in real time and control the telescopes from the other side of the Earth!!!

Well, we still need the telescope operators for safety and fine tuning of the telescope parameters, but the science part can all be done remotely. As I was telling Alexandre Oliveira, a Brazilian resident astronomer at CTIO, "it is not robotic yet, but it is - quite sucessfully - really remote".

Now, you all have a good Saturday. I am finishing the details of my talk and tomorrow I will drive to Cerro Pachon and Cerro Tololo. Just wait great pictures soon.

Hasta la vista.

Leaving to Chile - 11th Regional IAU Meeting

Not much to post today. Finished my poster for IAU, discussed the closing of the topology paper with Armando Bernui... we keep on excusing ourselves along the whole text, saying that what we detect is not a foreground signal. It clearly comes from CMB but we do not dare to say that, UNTIL TODAY (so I hope). A couple more days and I expect to close this paper before the end of the year. You can check another "reading" of this topology approach through a paper of Armando Bernui on astro-ph/0511592.

Otherwise, paperwork, luggage preparation, writing last minute emails... one good thing is that in Chile I will have some spare time to work on the preparation of two other papers for early January 2006 (MNRAS with Ana Paula and Andre; ASTROBIOLOGY with Claudia, Amancio, Sergio and Heloisa). Great closing of 2005!

OK, I am departing to Guarulhos airport in about 1h for the 11th IAU Regional Meeting. Will try to keep you posted from there. There are some very promising talks scheduled during the meeting and I will also report my impressions from Cerro Tololo International Observatory and from my talk there.

See you Friday!

The I Brazilian Workshop on Astrobiology

For over 2 weeks I have been dealing with finishing two papers and organizing this Astrobiology workshop. The objective of the I Brazilian Workshop on Astrobiology (BWA) is to gather, for the first time in Brazil, professional scientists and graduate students from different fields that have been working or are interested in starting a career in one of the various topics related to Astrobiology, in a formal and academic environment.

The increasing number of papers in this area in the last few years is noticeable, coming mainly from Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry and Geology fields. Presently in Brazil there are astronomers searching for exoplanets, trying to understand the formation of planetary discs and, along with chemists, studying the chemistry of interstellar medium, particularly searching for organic compounds. Biologists have focused on extremophiles, studying their survival conditions and evolution in environements under extreme conditions (high temperature, pressure, salinity and pH). Geologists have worked in the investigation of atmospheric and geologic records of young Earth.

The I BWA is intended as an environment for scientists and graduate students interested in this multidisciplinary field to exchange ideas, results and perspectives for the development of the field in Brazil, with poster sessions, review talks and oral communications. The discussion sessions at the end of morning and afternoon talks will offer a good opportunity to exchange specific knowledge and expertise among the different fields represented in the workshop.

Go visit the web page!!!

Right now, finishing the IAU poster - "Can the Local Supercluster explain the low CMB multipoles?". The idea is that the low quadrupole observed in the CMB power spectrum since the COBE measurements, and confirmed by many other experiments in the late 90s and the WMAP data, might be due to the SZ effect in the direction of the Virgo cluster. The strong effect may remove the CMB photons from that area, distorting the low order multipoles and introducing an alignment mainly noted in the quadrupole and octupole.

We made a statistical test to verify if the alignment and the low intensity of the quadrupole could happen by chance. In short, the chance that this alignment is caused by a SZ intensity as we propose is larger than 1 sigma. On the other hand, the chance that the effect is purely caused by the CMB data as measured by WMAP is ruled out by over 2.5 sigma.

I gotta go back to finish the poster.

Soundtrack: Bluesology (Modern Jazz Quartet)