A team of researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the UB (ICCUB), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH, USA), and the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona (RACAB), detected the first naked-eye solar superflare in Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. The obtained results limit the habitability of the Proxima b exoplanet, orbited by this star.

A solar flare is a phenomenon causing an increase in the brightness of a star due its magnetic activity. For Proxima Centauri, another star activating the Sun, these flares emit lethal amounts of UV radiation and charged particles, such as protons, that can destroy the ozone (O3) of Proxima b’s atmosphere. This research study, published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, states that “the temporary distribution of these solar super flares takes place at least about five times per year, which means the 90 % of the O₃ of Proxima b would disappear in five years, and the rest would be removed at scales of 100,000 years”, says Octavi Fors (ICCUB, UCN-CH, RACAB), one of the authors of the study.

“Since Proxima b does not have O₃ , and the UV radiation level is about a hundred times more intense than the one the most resistant microorganism can bear, the kind of life in the surface of the planet is very limited. This would suit only extremely UV radiation-resistant organisms”, says Daniel del Ser (ICCUB, UNC-CH, RACAB), co-author of the study. “In fact –the researcher continues- those ways of life that are not protected under a surface (such an ocean) would hardly survive in a planet that is exposed to these kind of violent ultraviolet emissions”.

Data obtained from the Evryscope telescope, which conducts observations on the entire visible sky every two minutes. This solar super flare was observed in March 2016, when Proxima Centauri was seventy times brighter and therefore was easily seen.

At the same time the Evryscope observations were conducted, the HARPS high resolution spectrograph analysed the visible spectrum of the solar flare to determine, among other reasons, the existence of a coronal mass ejection. Also, the photochemical effects of the atmospheric compounds produced by the extreme stellar activity were modelled.

Article reference:

Ward S. Howard, Matt A. Tilley, Hank Corbett, Allison Youngblood, R. O. Parke Loyd, Jeffrey K. Ratzloff, Nicholas M. Law, Octavi Fors, Daniel del Ser, Evgenya L. Shkolnik, Carl Ziegler, Erin E. Goeke, Aaron D. Pietraallo, Joshua Haislip. “The first naked-eye superflare detected from Proxima Centauri”. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 860:L30, June, 2018.

This article has been writen by the UB news.

The ICCUB has signed an agreement with Scientifica International, S.L.U to cooperate in the areas of nuclear and particle physics, space sciences and industry for science. This general agreement sets the bases for future collaborations between the ICCUB and Scientifica, and has a twofold objective. First, Scientifica will contribute to the commercialization of products developed at ICCUB, in particular, instrumentation, electronics and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Secondly, both units will cooperate in highly complex technological projects and will apply together in research and development calls from funding organizations such as the European Space Agency, CERN or ITER.

With the signing of this general agreement the relationship of the ICCUB with Scientifica will be reinforced. For instance, a license agreement has already been signed between Fundació Bosch i Gimpera (the technology transfer office of the University of Barcelona) and Scientifica to commercialize an enhanced Multi-purpose Integrated Circuit ( eMUSIC ) developed at ICCUB. The circuit sum signals received from a silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) array at high speed, high dynamic range and low noise working at a lower voltage. Originally designed for future upgrades of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), eMUSIC can in fact be used in many other scientific and industry applications, like medical imaging, spectrophotometers, fluorescence microscopy, telescopes, radiation detection, and synchrotron and particle accelerators. The technology has been patented by the University of Barcelona and is now patent pending in Europe and the United States.

In a presentation held during the election campaign, X. Luri established as the primary goals of his program the consolidation of the institute, the increase of the internal cohesion and the promotion of more and better science. After congratulating the former directors of the ICCUB for the excellent progress made by the institute since it was created in 2006, he emphasized the benefits brought by the Maria de Maeztu award and insisted on the importance of renewing the accreditation to secure the success achieved so far.

PhD in Physics by the University of Barcelona in 1993, X. Luri continued his career at the UB within the field of space missions, especially for the Gaia Mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), of which he was one of the proposers. He is presently associate professor at the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics (FQA), co-PI of the Gaia group at the ICCUB and a member of the Gaia-DPAC (Gaia data processing consortium) executive committee, where he manages the group in charge of the archive development. He has been IP of several projects of the Spanish National Plan dedicated to the development of Gaia data processing and IP of the European project GENIUS FP7, dedicated to the development of tools for the data archive. He has also been a member of the executive board of the Spanish Astronomical Society. Apart from his tasks on research and management, X. Luri is a very active science disseminator and is one of the founders of Big Van company, which groups active scientists working in science dissemination. Since 2013 he is also founder member of DAPCOM SL, a UB and UPC spin-off company, where he participates as a scientific and business advisor.

A. Parreño, also PhD in Physics by the University of Barcelona in 1997, has devoted her research career to understanding how nuclear constituents interact. After completing her PhD thesis on a theoretical model to describe the decay of hypernuclear systems, her interest shifted to less model-dependent strategies to approach the interaction among baryons. She performed part of her postdoctoral research at the Institute for Nuclear Theory, in Seattle, USA, as research associate, and returned to the University of Barcelona in 2001, eventually becoming an associate professor in 2007. Recently, she has joint several initiatives to use supercomputation to further understand how nuclei emerge from the complicated quark-gluon dynamics. In this field, she has led and participated in several PRACE projects and in 2004 she cofounded the Nuclear Physics with Lattice QCD Collaboration (nplqcd.ub.edu/). Previously to becoming vice-director of the ICCUB, A. Parreño has been serving on the on the Scientific Board of the Institute since 2016.

F. Mescia obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of Rome in 2002. After holding different positions in Southampton, Rome and Frascati, he joined the University of Barcelona in 2008, where he became an associate professor in 2014. F. Mescia’s main research interests are in the field of the phenomenology of the elementary particles within and beyond the Standard Model. He has made important scientific contributions in this field throughout his career, in particular in flavour physics. Previously to becoming secretary of the ICCUB, F. Mescia has been serving on the on the Executive Board of the Institute since 2016 and in the ICCUB Colloquia Commission since 2010.

It is named in honour of the greek female astronomer, and following the tradition by the group to honour female pioneers in astronomy: our other supercomputer is called Hipatia.

The supercomputer provided by Bull provides nearly 1.000 computing Intel Xeon cores and a shared memory of 12Tb; this provides nearly 10M cpu hours/year of dedicated 100% use to cosmology. It will be used exclusively by the group and will be used to unravel the deepest mysteries of the cosmos by not only simulating the universe or analysing future survey data, but also by developing new ideas about how the cosmos, and nature, work.

The Gravity Research Foundation was founded by Roger W. Babson (1875- 1967) and the first awards for the best essays submitted on Gravity were made on December 1st, 1949. Since then, each edition has been a high level competition among scientists from all over the world, many times being the winners reputated scientists previously awarded Nobel Prizes.

Within the framework of the Gaia project, the group of the Virtual Observatory (VO), an international initiative with the aim of creating a federation of astronomical data archives worldwide, has developed two analytical tools to allow astronomers work quickly and precisely with all the information that exists in the Virtual Observatory about the Gaia objects: VOSA and Clusterix. Carme Jordi and Lola Balaguer-Núñez, researchers from the ICCUB, have participated in the development of one of these tools, Clusterix.

Gaia is expected to significantly increase the number of known star clusters, but it is necessary to determine the physical parameters of their members, checking that they share common properties different from the stars in their vicinity. To facilitate this huge task, the VO group, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Barcelona (ICCUB-IEEC), have developed a tool that compiles all the known information about a determined object, such as its movements and distances, in order to visualize and assign a membership probability to each star in a cluster area, in a simple and efficient way for the astronomer (see figure 2).

On the other hand, to be able to know more physical fundamental parameters of the stars, it is necessary to complement the information provided by Gaia with measurements in other wavelengths, from ultraviolet to infrared and analyze that data compared with theoretical models. The VOSA tool, developed by the CAB (CSIC-INTA) in collaboration with scientist from Valparaiso University (Chile), performs this process automatically for thousands of objects at the same time.

Press release from CAB (in Spanish) attached.

The 4th Science Festival of the University of Barcelona, to be held on Friday May 11 during the morning at the Historical Building, comes with many new activities.

The festival, organised by La UB divulga, aims to make research carried at the University accessible to everyone, in a fun and innovative way. Therefore, throughout the day, UB - organize outreach activities, workshops, talks and games that will value the work of researchers from all fields of knowledge.

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona and the Quantum Physics and Astrophysics Department participate in this event with several workshops.

Workshop "3D constellations" (ICCUB (IEEC-UB)-FQA)

A workshop to create constellations, which will serve to better understand the distances between stars in the three dimensions of the space, and their different physical properties.

This workshop will include a large-scale representation of the Gaia's first sky map. An all-sky view of stars in our Galaxy – the Milky Way – and neighbouring galaxies, based on the first year of observations from ESA's Gaia satellite, from July 2014 to September 2015.This map shows the density of stars observed by Gaia in each portion of the sky.

Activity sheet

Video demo

Workshop: "Ultracold UB" (ICCUB-FQA):

Participants will be able to learn about some of the most relevant phenomena of quantum mechanics, taking as an example the current research in physics laboratories of ultracold gases. Quantum technologies will be of great importance in the near future in both computing and cryptography techniques and information handling. This makes it essential that the whole population acquires a minimum familiarity with its most fascinating aspects. All the material of this workshop has been made in open code by university course students of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona.

The workshop consists of making simulations with computers of several experiments in which the quantum properties of matter are revealed. In particular, the simulation of the movement of a set of ultra-cold atoms trapped in a potential well (analogy with the movement of a pendulum), the simulation of the movement of a soliton in an atomic gas at temperature 0 K or the simulation of a quantum Newton pendulum.

Software made in open code by the students of the Physics Faculty of the UB.

Team: M. Guilleumas, B. Julià, I. Morera, P. Mujal

Cosmic ray muons, are charged particles produced in the upper atmosphere. They propagate at almost the speed of light and reach the surface of the Earth, where they can be detected.

This telescope conceived in Gran Sasso and belonging to Canfranc Laboratory is part of a project involving the Canfranc underground laboratory, which includes three telescopes of muons and an App. These detectors are used for outreach activities and can measure the muons in real time and show their trajectory.The detectors can measure in real time muons and show their trajectory. The detectors are used for outreach activities. In addition, we have developed an APP for Android (for iPhone is underway) named Cosmic Rays Live, which can be downloaded through Play Store. The APP allows all interested users to select a location and to look at muons detected in real time. At the present time the portable detectors are located on surface. However, in the near future we will install one detector underground in Spain at about 850m below the surface. The number of cosmic muons is reduced by the rock shielding. This allows the users to understand the difference of being on surface or underground. The reduction of cosmic rays is the main reason to operate underground laboratories for searching rare events such as interactions of dark matter particles.

Muons

Hydrogen nuclei (protons), mainly, and other heavier particles coming from the entire galaxy, after wandering in space for millions of years and accelerated by ‘supernova’ explosions, hit the Earth's atmosphere, where they disintegrate into many other particles with exotic names such as pions, kaons, neutrinos and muons. Among them, muons, charged particles very similar to electrons, but slightly heavier, can get to us! Muons from the upper atmosphere can reach the Earth’s surface and deep inside. Most people don’t realize that particles pass through us and the world we inhabit, constantly. Muons, for example, hit us with a flux of about 200 particles per square metre per second at sea level. These particles have an electrical charge, mass and energy, but cannot be perceived in any way even though they pass through us constantly. Most of them can penetrate up to several hundred of meters into the Earth.

Survey on the best physicist of the 20th century

Team: Students of the 1st year f the Degree on Physics

a project consisting of several surveys to identify the most important physicist of the 20th century. From the point of view of the general public, of the students of science and of the scientists. Each participant is classified in one of these categories (and its gender) and has 5 points to be reasonably distributed among a maximum of five people. The activity itself is already considered as a outreach project but also the results of the surveys can give us very relevant information about how scientists see themselves and how the world sees them. This project is a initiative of a group of 1st Degree Students of the Physics Faculty of the UB and it is developed with the support of this Faculty.

Related ICCUB Activity: http://icc.ub.edu/activity/1168

Organizes: La UB divulga