Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have used 140,000 distant quasars to measure the expansion rate of the Universe when it was only one-quarter of its present age (now, the Universe is 13 billion years old). This is the best measurement yet of the expansion rate at any epoch in the last 13 billion years. Andreu Font Ribera, who holds a PhD from UB and researches at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, United States), and Jordi Miralda, ICREA researcher from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of UB (ICCUB), have participated in the study. Measuring the expansion rate of the Universe over its entire history is key to determine the nature of the dark energy that is responsible for causing this expansion rate to increase during the past six billion years.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), pioneered the technique of measuring the structure of the young Universe by using quasars to map the distribution of intergalactic hydrogen gas. New BOSS observations of this structure were presented at the April 2014 meeting of the American Physical Society in Savannah (United States).

Scientists have heralded a "whole new era" in physics with the detection of "primordial gravitational waves" – the first tremors of the big bang.

The minuscule ripples in space-time are the last prediction of Albert Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity to be verified. Until now, there has only been circumstantial evidence of their existence. The discovery also provides a deep connection between general relativity and quantum mechanics, another central pillar of physics.

"This is a genuine breakthrough," says Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist from University College London who was not involved in the work. "It represents a whole new era in cosmology and physics as well." If the discovery is confirmed, it will almost certainly lead to a Nobel Prize.

The detection, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was announced on Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and comes from the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (Bicep2) experiment – a telescope at the South Pole.

The detection also provides the first direct evidence for a long-held hypothesis called inflation. This states that a fraction of a second after the big bang, the universe was driven to expand hugely. Without this sudden growth spurt, the gravitational waves would not have been amplified enough to be visible.

www.theguardian.com/science/2014/mar/17/primordial-gravitational-wave-discovery-physics-bicep

The Culture Institute of Barcelona conferred the 2013 Barcelona City Award in the category of Experimental Sciences and Technology to the group of scientists who collaborated in the project Gaia of the University of Barcelona, composed by researchers of the Department of Astronomy and Meteorology and members of the Institute of Sciences of the Cosmos (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC). The award ceremony takes place on 11 February at the Saló de Cent of Barcelona City Council.

The jury emphasises that Gaia UB Group (ICCUB/IECC) is awarded “for their remarkable contribution to the design of Gaia, the satellite that was successfully launched on 19 December 2013 and will created the most complete 3D map of the Milky Way. They have played a major role in defining and designing instruments and performing simulations to prepare the data processing system”. The jury of the category was composed by Josep Amat, David Jou, Víctor Puntes, David Serrat and Fernando Albericio.

The Barcelona City Council confers the Barcelona City Awards every year. The objective is to honour the creation, research and good quality cultural production done by Barcelonese individuals or groups and institutions or organizations which promote and develop this type of activities.

Gaia is considered the cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) not only for its ability to revolution future astrophysics —thanks to the unprecedented accuracy of its astrometric observations—, but also for the technological challenge it means. In addition, the project constitutes the maximum exponent of a technology that places Europe in a leading position in the field of astrometry.

Gaia UB Group (ICCUB/IEEC) has been involved in Gaia mission since the very early phases. It has played a major role in the scientific and technological design of the instrumentation, database prototypes and data simulation. It has also developed a calibration algorithm of photometric data, and the system that will enable to daily process satellite’s data and store them in a database to later extract the first scientific results. Parallelly, the group is developing tools for scientific exploitation, by means of data got from the Earth in order to complement the one provided by Gaia. It leads the development of the catalogues of the mission, the intermediate ones and the final one.

No one had found these kind of binary systems although they had been predicted theoretically. Using the Liverpool and Mercator telescopes in the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos ( La Palma, Canary Islands), a team of researchers from different Spanish centers have located the first known binary system consisting of a black hole and a Be kind star. Today Nature has published the discovery.

Be stars are relatively abundant in the universe. Only in our galaxy over eighty binary systems with neutron stars are known. "Its peculiarity is the high centrifugal force, which make them rotate near its breaking limit" explains Jorge Casares, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL). Scientists believe that this is a member of a hidden population of Be stars with black holes: "We believe that these systems are much more abundant but difficult to detect, since the black holes are being fed with gas expelled by Be the star in a "silent" way, i.e. without emitting much radiation", remarks Casares.

Together with Jorge Casares, Ignacio Negueruela, Marc Ribó and Ignasi Ribas, also participated in the research Josep Maria Paredes (ICC), Artemio Herrero and Simon and Sergio, both scientists and IAC and ULL. Scientists from the ICC and ICE are also members of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC).

ICC-UB researchers Licia Verde and Antonio Cuesta have participated in the international project BOSS (Baryons Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey).
New high precision measurements, ~1%, of distant galaxies have been obtained in this survey. These measurements help on the understanding of the expansion of the universe.

The Ison comet passed through the solar atmosphere last Friday 29th of November.
ISON was not visible during its closest approach to the sun, so many scientists thought it had disintegrated. However, material from it appeared some hours later as a white smear heading up and away from the sun.
The question remains whether it is merely debris from the comet, or if some portion of the comet's nucleus survived, but late-night analysis from scientists with NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign suggest that there is at least a small nucleus intact.

It is known that black holes launch relativistic jets both in stellar-mass binary systems and at the centres of galaxies, in the so-called ‘quasars’. Although jets have been studied for decades, their composition has remained uncertain. Now, a work, published on Nature and led by researchers from the University of Barcelona, the German headquarters of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Curtin University (Australia), presents the detection of atomic nuclei in the relativistic jets from the black hole binary system 4U 1630-47.
“In this work, we have found the composition of relativistic jets launched from around black holes; however, more studies are needed to understand if results can be extrapolated to other relativistic jet sources”, explains Simone Migliari, from the Institute of Sciences of the Cosmos of the UB (ICCUB). According to the researcher, the research proves that relativistic jets might be ‘heavy jets’ containing atomic nuclei, rather than ‘light jets’ consisting of electrons and positrons only”. “The finding —he adds— implies that ‘heavy jets’ carry away significantly more energy from the black hole than ‘lighter’ ones”.

Such baryonic jets, composed by heavy matter, are more likely to be powered by the accretion disc rather than the spin of the black hole. “If baryons can be accelerated to relativistic speeds, these systems should be strong sources of gamma rays and neutrino emission”, concludes Migliari, visiting researcher at the Astrobiology Centre (CAB) of the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (CSIC-INTA).

Black holes in binary systems catch companions’ matter in order to create a disc that rotates around the black hole at high speed. Consequently, matter is compressed and it gets enough hot to emit X-rays. The research also provides an accurate estimate of the speed of the jets, which was found to be 2/3 of the speed of light, by detecting the presence of Fe atomic nuclei in Doppler-shift.

In 2012, observations were done nearly simultaneously by means of two types of facilities: on one hand, the telescopes XMM-Newton of the European Space Agency, which enable to perform X-ray observations in order to observe the disc that surrounds the black hole; and on the other hand, the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), used to carry out radio observations to see the relativist jet.

Concerning the relevance of the work published on Nature, it is important to highlight that 4U 1630-47 is a common binary system in accreting black holes; therefore, these results can be extrapolated to other similar systems.

CERN, along with Peter Higgs and François Englert, today receives the Prince of Asturias Award for "the theoretical prediction and experimental detection of the Higgs boson." CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer will accept the prestigious prize on behalf of the Laboratory during a ceremony this afternoon at Oviedo’s Campoamor Theatre in Spain.

"I’m greatly honoured to receive, on behalf of CERN, the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, shared with Peter Higgs and François Englert," said Heuer. "This prize recognises the importance of the discovery and is an award for all scientists – experimentalists and theorists – who made it possible."

Spain’s scientific and industrial communities are strong contributors to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its experiments, which together make up the unique fundamental research facility at which the Higgs boson was discovered. Today Spanish physicists are heavily involved in analysing the data collected by the LHC experiments, with many more advances in our understanding of the universe anticipated.

The award ceremony will take place in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen of Spain and Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Asturias. CERN management has decided that the prize to CERN will be used to offer ten grants for PhD students from around the world to attend next year’s major particle physics conference, the International Conference on High Energy Physics, ICHEP2014, in Valencia.

"The ICHEP conference is one of the most prestigious international conferences in the field of particle physics," said Heuer. "I am happy that this award makes it possible for CERN to allow ten students from around the world to attend next year".

The prize to CERN will also be used to launch a competition for school students in Spain. Pupils aged 6-18 will be challenged to submit a drawing, photo, video or a news article. Their entries will be evaluated through a public vote and by an expert committee involving scientists from CERN and CPAN, the Spanish Centre for Particle Physics, which will contribute to the competition with related outreach activities and awards. Six winners will be rewarded with a two-day visit to CERN. Full details of the competition will be available from 1 December on the CERNland children’s website.

"CERN shares with Fundación Principe de Asturias the wish to promote the importance of science and technology in our daily life and the importance of the collective effort to achieve ambitious objectives such as the discovery of the Higgs Boson," said Heuer. "The competition will involve hundreds of young pupils and will help us see how the younger generation perceives science and technology."