At the end of their lives, massive stars usually undergo core-collapse and explode in a highly energetic burst called supernova. However, what happens to very massive stars with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun? How do they evolve and explode? How are they related to the brightest supernovae in the universe - superluminous supernovae (SLSNe)?

Prof. Xiaofeng Wang's team of Tsinghua University, in collaboration with national and international research teams, has monitored the nearby superluminous supernova SN2017egm for more than one year, revealing its extremely complex luminosity evolution (Figure 1).

By fitting the total luminosity evolution of the object with various kinds of energy source models, the team found that such a “bumpy” light curve mainly originated from the interaction of material ejected during the supernova explosion with four shells of circumstellar material (CSM). The existence of these CSM shells reveals that, right before the final collapse, the progenitor star of the supernova experienced frequent mass ejections with an average rate of 1-10 solar masses per year. Such a frequent and massive mass ejection is inconsistent with ordinary stellar wind and binary interaction models, but they are likely driven by a mechanism called pulsational pair-instability (PPI). 

Combining these models, the initial core of the star is estimated to be about 50 solar masses. This core lost 7-8 solar masses during the PPI phase, when it produced the four shells of circumstellar material, and it ejected 2-3 solar masses of material in the final burst. During this last phase, the ejected material interacted with the pre-existing circumstellar shells powering one of the most luminous stellar explosions observed in our Universe and leaving behind a corpse consisting of a black hole of about 40 solar masses. 

This has important implications for the formation of the tens of solar masses black holes, which have been recently detected by LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave observatories. This work shows that such heavy black holes can be produced through the mentioned mechanisms, and not only via the merger of lighter black holes.

In order to trigger the PPI mechanism, stars need to have a very heavy helium core, which, according to the single stellar evolution theory, usually evolves from a massive star with a low metal abundance. However, the progenitor star of SN2017egm is located in a metal-rich environment, which opens up many questions about its mysterious origin.

“We got really excited about SN2017egm, because in contrast to previous superluminous supernovae, which usually exploded in dwarf galaxies, its host was a large spiral galaxy. This challenged all our previous assumptions about how SLSNe are formed.” said Nadia Blagorodnova, member of ICCUB who contributed to the study.

This supernova could have originated from a metal-rich progenitor with greatly reduced mass-loss rate before oxygen burning stage, or a metal-poor star that somehow exploded in a metal-rich host galaxy, or even from the merger product of two massive stars. Which one of these scenarios is most plausible is still to be seen. 

“The research of this supernova is of great significance for testing current theory of stellar evolution and explosion, and for understanding the origin of superluminous supernovae and massive stellar-mass black holes”, says Dr. Lin, lead author of this work.

Collaborators

The collaborators of this paper include Prof. Xiaofeng Wang's research team at Tsinghua University, Dr. Lin Yan and her colleagues at California Institute of Technology, Prof. Avishay Gal-Yam of Weizmann Institute of Science, Prof. Alexei Filippenko’s research team at University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Ragnhild Lunnan at Stockholm University, Prof. Shuhrat A. Ehgamberdiev's research team at Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute and National University of Uzbekistan, Prof. Licai Deng’s team at China West Normal University, Dr. Nadejda Blagorodnova at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, Dr. Jicheng Zhang at Beijing Normal University, Prof. Jujia Zhang at Yunnan Observatories, Dr. Peter Brown at Texas A&M University, Prof. Lin Xiao at Hebei University and Dr. Lingjun Wang at Institute of High Energy Physics. The work of Prof. Xiaofeng Wang is supported by the National Natural Science Foundations of China, the Scholar Program of Beijing Academy of Science and Technology and the Tencent Xplorer Prize.

References:

Lin, W., Wang, X., Yan, L. et al. A superluminous supernova lightened by collisions with pulsational pair-instability shells. Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01957-3

An international team of European astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has detected an extremely small and previously unknown asteroid. At 100 to 200 metres in diameter, the object is probably the smallest observed to date by Webb within the main asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter.

The work, which was published on Astronomy & Astrophysics, counts with the participation of researcher Toni Santana-Ros of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) and the University of Alicante. 

The detection of this asteroid has relevant implications for understanding the formation and evolution of the Solar System. Current models predict the presence of very small asteroids, but they have not been studied in as much detail as their larger counterparts due to the great difficulty in observing them. In this sense, the great novelty of this finding lies in the fact that the research team has used a new technique to detect and characterise small objects with the data generated by the James Webb Telescope: the MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument) calibration based on infrared wavelengths. 

According to Thomas Müller, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany), they have quite unexpectedly detected a small asteroid in the publicly available MIRI calibration observations. In order to detect such a body with ground-based optical telescopes, more than an hour of observations with the largest telescopes available would have been required. However, with Webb, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space, the object is visible in just a few minutes of observation, as explained by Toni Santana-Ros (ICCUB-IEEC-UA), who is co-author of the study. 

A priori, the team could not know whether the detected object was very small and far away or very large and close. The novelty of the method used lies in the fact that the researchers have combined measurements of the position of the observed object with the constraints due to the thermal model derived from the JWST infrared observations. In this way, we were able to define the distance to the object and its size, Santana-Ros said. 

The Webb observations that revealed this small asteroid were not originally designed to hunt for new asteroids - in fact, they were calibration images of the main-belt asteroid 10920, which astronomers discovered in 1998. But the JWST calibration team considered them to have failed for technical reasons due to the brightness of the target and a shift in the telescope pointing. Nevertheless, they used the data from asteroid 10920 to establish and test the new technique for constraining the orbit of an object and estimating its size. The validity of the method was demonstrated for asteroid 10920 using MIRI observations combined with data from ground-based telescopes and ESA's Gaia mission. 

During the analysis of the MIRI data, astronomers discovered an asteroid in the same field of view that was much smaller than 10920 and previously unknown. The results of the work suggest that the object is between 100 and 200 metres long, which occupies a very low-inclination orbit, and is in the inner region of the main belt at the time of the Webb observations. 

The Solar System is full of asteroids and small rocky bodies: astronomers currently know of more than 1.1 million such remnants from the early Solar System. The ability of NASA, ESA and CSA's James Webb Space Telescope to explore these objects at infrared wavelengths is expected to lead to groundbreaking new scientific discoveries. 

The international team of astronomers involved in this study includes Toni Santana-Ros from the University of Alicante and University of Barcelona; P. Bartczak from the University of Alicante and A. Mickiewicz University (Poland); T. G. Müller and S. Kruk from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany); M. Micheli from ESA's NEO Coordination Centre (Italy); and D. Oszkiewicz from A. Mickiewicz University (Poland).

Reference: 

“Asteroids seen by JWST-MIRI: Radiometric size, distance, and orbit constraints”, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2023) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202245304

Further information

ESA/Webb 

Webb Space Telescope

Barcelona, 12 December, 2022. The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the WEAVE instrument team present observations of the first light with the WEAVE spectrograph. WEAVE is a powerful new generation multifibre spectrograph in the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma, Canary Islands) which has recently been launched and is already generating high-quality data.

Astronomers from all over Europe have planned eight surveys for observation with WEAVE, including studies of stellar evolution, the Milky Way, the galaxy evolution and cosmology. In line with the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, WEAVE will be used to obtain spectra of several million stars in the disc and halo of our galaxy, enabling the archaeology of the Milky Way. Nearby and distant galaxies will be studied to know the history of their growth. And quasars will be used as indications to map the spatial distribution and interaction of gas and galaxies when the universe was only about 20% of today's age.

First light observations: Stephan's Quintet galaxies

WEAVE targeted NGC 7318a and NGC 7318b, two galaxies at the centre of Stephan's Quintet, a group of interacting galaxies. This group had already been observed with the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra telescopes, among others, and more recently also with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It is also famous for its role in the 1946 Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life. Its galaxies, four of which are 280 million light-years from Earth, are colliding with each other, providing an excellent "close-up" laboratory for studying the consequences of galaxy collisions and subsequent evolution.

The observations of the first light were carried out with the so-called Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) fibre array, one of WEAVE’s three fibre systems. When using the LIFU, 547 very compact optical fibres transmit the light from a hexagonal area of the sky to the spectrograph, where it is analysed and recorded.

WEAVE’s LIFU has measured a large number of individual spectra of the two central galaxies of Stephan's quintet and their surroundings, and has examined the intensity of the colours of their light, from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared. These spectra reveal, among other information, details essential for studying the collision processes, such as the motion and distribution of stars and gas, and their chemical composition. From these data, we can learn how galaxy collisions transform the other galaxies in the group.

Marc Balcells, ING director, explains: "Our goal has been to install a unique instrument that will allow us to carry out cutting-edge astronomical research. It has been fantastic to receive financial support from the national research agencies of the three ING partner countries (UK, Spain and the Netherlands), as well as contributions from other non-ING countries (France and Italy). We are pleased to demonstrate that the LIFU part of WEAVE not only works, but produces high-quality data. The ING telescopes will continue to deliver results of high scientific impact in the coming years. We look forward to announcing soon the first-light events for the other observing modes, which are currently in the final calibration phase”.

The WEAVE, a new generation spectrograph

The WEAVE spectrograph uses optical fibres to collect light from celestial objects and transmits it to a spectrograph that separates the light according to its different wavelengths. It can work at two different spectral resolutions, which are used to measure the speeds of objects in the line of sight (using the Doppler effect) and to determine their chemical composition. The versatility of WEAVE is one of its main strengths. While the LIFU mode contains hundreds of fibres in a compact distribution, essential for imaging extended areas of the sky, in the MOS mode about a thousand individual fibres can be placed (by two robots) to simultaneously collect light from stars, galaxies or quasars. During the first five years of operation, spectra of millions of individual stars and galaxies are expected, a goal that can be achieved thanks to the WEAVE spectrograph's ability to observe so many bodies at once.

The Catalan contribution to the WEAVE spectrograph

This project involves scientists from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). The Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) is taking part with researchers from the ICCUB and UPC units. The Catalan institutions have worked, from the beginning of the project, on the definition of the scientific objectives and the selection of the objects to be observed —from stars in various evolutionary phases to star clusters— as well as in the sampling of quasars, extremely bright and very distant active nuclei galaxies. Specifically, two ICCUB-IEEC members, Maria Monguió and Mercè Romero-Gómez, and one from the UPC, Roberto Raddi, are members of the international working groups on young stars, galactic archaeology and white dwarfs that make up the team of scientists responsible for planning the observations. Teresa Antoja and Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols, also from the ICCUB-IEEC, co-lead the research teams responsible for galactic disc dynamics and quasars, respectively.

Maria Monguió, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB-IEEC), says: "After years of preparation, we hope to soon be able to obtain the first spectra of stars in the disc of our galaxy. The quantity and quality of the millions of spectra we expect to observe will allow us, among other things, to analyse regions of recent star formation and to measure how stars move. These data, together with those provided by the Gaia mission, will allow us to address fundamental questions about the formation and evolution of the Milky Way”.

Roberto Raddi, commenting on the contribution of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, says: "Our team will contribute to the study of some 100,000 white dwarfs previously observed by Gaia, and discover the secrets behind the last evolutionary phases of Sun-like stars, including the fate of their planetary systems, as well as the mechanisms that lead to supernova explosions in binary systems with white dwarfs".

Further information:

https://www.ing.iac.es/PR/press/weave_LIFU_first_light.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03981

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Dr. Carla Marín, a researcher at the Experimental Particle Physics Group at the Institute of Cosmos Science of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant with more than 1.6M€ to carry out her project “Challenging the Standard Model with suppressed b to d ll decays (CLIMB)”.

ERC Starting Grants, which are part of the program Horizon Europe, are designed to help talented researchers who want to establish their research teams in Europe. The awarded candidates must have an excellent scientific track record showing scientific talent and an excellent research proposal for the next five years. These are evaluated on the basis of excellence as the sole criterion by selected international peer reviewers.

 About the CLIMB project 

The Standard Model of Particle Physics is one of the most complete scientific theories we have developed so far. Despite its hugely successful predictive power, it still fails to explain some observations that are key to understanding our Universe, such as the dominance of matter over antimatter. In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the LHCb experiment studies decays of b quarks, which result from the proton collisions. The CLIMB project focuses on the rare decays which are those that occur less than once in every million decays. The scarcity of these decays makes them very sensitive to the existence of new particles and forces beyond the Standard Model, which can modify their properties. In recent years, a set of deviations from the predictions of the Standard Model have been observed in the decays of b quarks to an s quark and two leptons, electrons or muons, (b -> s ll), which could be an indication of the existence of new physics.

 The CLIMB project will explore even rarer decays of the b quark to a d quark and two leptons (b -> d ll), which occur once in 100 million. The b -> dll transitions are related to the b -> s ll transitions through the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa (CKM) matrix that describes quark mixing in the Standard Model, but their hierarchy is not well understood. Explaining the origin of this hierarchy is the motivation for many new physics models, and therefore, accurately measuring the relationship between b -> sll and b -> dll decays is key information for these models. Due to its suppression, to this day we have very little experimental information on b -> dll transitions. CLIMB aims to radically change this situation. To this end, Dr. Marín’s team will use unique data from the LHCb experiment which contain billions of b quarks, and develop new reconstruction and analysis techniques in order to observe and measure the properties of these sneaky decays.

In the words of Dr. Marín, “due to the rarity of these decays and the difficulty of measuring electrons at the LHCb experiment, new techniques of particle reconstruction and data analysis need to be developed, and here is where the challenge really lies. If we succeed, we will be able to compare transitions with muons and electrons, which should occur exactly the same number of times but which recent experiments indicate may not be the case. This would be clear evidence for the existence of Physics beyond the Standard Model.”

About Dr. Carla Marín

Carla Marín joined the Experimental Particle Physics Group at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona in 2013 to initiate her doctoral thesis with prof. Lluís Garrido.

After obtaining her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire, Orsay (2018-2021) and CERN (2021-2022).

In 2022, she rejoined the ICCUB where she is currently a tenure-track lecturer.

Outside Particle Physics, Carla Marin enjoys chess and playing football with colleagues from the Physics faculty at the regular weekly matches.

The Gaia collaboration, which is responsible for the spacecraft that is currently building the largest and most precise three-dimensional map of our galaxy, will receive the 2023 Lancelot M. Berkeley − New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy. Bestowed annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from the New York Community Trust, the Berkeley prize includes a monetary award and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting, often called the “Super Bowl of Astronomy.” The 241st AAS meeting will be held in Seattle, Washington, from 8 to 12 January 2023.

The Gaia collaboration is being honored with the 2023 Berkeley prize for enabling a transformative, multidimensional map of the Milky Way. Since its launch in 2013, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope has recorded stellar positions, distances, colors, and proper motions for nearly two billion stars in our galaxy. According to the prize statement, “Gaia’s three data releases will long be regarded as major events in the history of astronomy, triggering a global partnership to better understand the origin, structure, and destiny of our home galaxy.”

Each year the three AAS Vice Presidents, in consultation with the Editor in Chief of the AAS journals, select the Berkeley prize winner for meritorious research published within the preceding 12 months. The Gaia team is recognized in particular for an article published in Astronomy & Astrophysics in May 2021 describing the early contents and survey properties behind the Gaia mission’s most recent data release.

The exquisite precision and immense volume of the Gaia’s survey has entirely transformed the way stellar and galactic astronomy is conducted. The mission’s three data releases thus far encompass the largest low-resolution spectroscopic and radial velocity surveys in history, capturing detailed information and mapping roughly 1.8 billion Milky Way stars, including 10 million variable stars and 813,000 binary systems. In addition, the mission is enabling advances in both extragalactic and solar system science: it has cataloged 3 million galaxies, 2 million quasars (distant and bright galactic nuclei), and 156,000 solar system objects, including near-Earth and main-belt asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects. 

The Gaia’s full third data release, which was welcomed worldwide on 13 June 2022, was accompanied by nearly 50 scientific articles by the Gaia collaboration. Reflective of the mission’s impact on the science of astronomy, this immense body of work includes the highest cited papers in all of astronomy over the past year.

“The AAS and the New York Community Trust send our gratitude and congratulations to the many hundreds of scientists, engineers, and program/technical/support personnel at the European Space Agency and far beyond for bringing this transformative mission to life. Gaia will forever remain a landmark achievement in humanity’s story of cosmic exploration,” the AAS Vice Presidents commented in a statement.

The Gaia data catalogs are produced by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), a collaboration that consists of hundreds of scientists and engineers from around the world. The Berkeley Prize will be accepted on behalf of the Gaia collaboration by Anthony Brown (Leiden Observatory), Chair of the DPAC Executive, and he will give the prize lecture on Thursday afternoon, 12 January 2023, at the Seattle Convention Center.

Spanish contribution to Gaia

A number of Spanish institutions are participating actively in the Gaia Collaboration including the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB-IEEC), which is leading the Spanish contribution, the University of A Coruña (UdC), the University of Vigo (UVigo) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS).

The role of the ICCUB-IEEC team focused on the scientific and technological design of the project, the development of the data processing system and the production of simulated data. A part of the software for the processing of the data sent by the satellite has been developed by the ICCUB-IEEC team and is executed at the MareNostrum Supercomputer, of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). 

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own. "For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one," says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

“We identified a ‘needle in a haystack’,” says Shenar who started the study at KU Leuven in Belgium [1] and is now a Marie-Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University, the Netherlands. Though other similar black hole candidates have been proposed, the team claims this is the first ‘dormant’ stellar-mass black hole to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy.

Stellar-mass black holes form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. In a binary, a system of two stars revolving around each other, there is the chance of finding a black hole from the motion of a luminous companion star. “From the nearly circular orbit of this binary, we could conclude that this black hole did not receive a velocity kick when it formed in a supernova explosion, a fact that will help us get a better understanding of the origin of gravitational waves detected by the LIGO-Virgo detectors”, comments ICREA Professor Mark Gieles from the ICCUB. He is a co-author on the paper, and leads the Virgo gravitational wave research group of the ICCUB, who analyse and interpret the rapidly growing number of detected compact object collisions, such as binary black holes. 

The black hole is ‘dormant’ if it does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation, which is how such black holes are typically detected. “It is incredible that we hardly know of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them to be”, explains co-author Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven. The newly found black hole is at least nine times the mass of our Sun, and orbits a hot, blue star weighing 25 times the Sun’s mass.

Dormant black holes are particularly hard to spot since they do not interact much with their surroundings. “For more than two years now, we have been looking for such black-hole-binary systems,” says co-author Julia Bodensteiner, a research fellow at ESO in Germany. “I was very excited when I heard about VFTS 243, which in my opinion is the most convincing candidate reported to date.” [2]

To find VFTS 243, the collaboration searched nearly 1000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, looking for the ones that could have black holes as companions. Identifying these companions as black holes is extremely difficult, as so many alternative possibilities exist.

“As a researcher who has debunked potential black holes in recent years, I was extremely sceptical regarding this discovery,” says Shenar. The scepticism was shared by co-author Kareem El-Badry of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in the USA, whom Shenar calls the “black hole destroyer”. “When Tomer asked me to double check his findings, I had my doubts. But I could not find a plausible explanation for the data that did not involve a black hole,” explains El-Badry.

The discovery also allows the team a unique view into the processes that accompany the formation of black holes. Astronomers believe that a stellar-mass black hole forms as the core of a dying massive star collapses, but it remains uncertain whether a powerful supernova explosion accompanies this.

"The star that formed the black hole in VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed entirely, with no sign of a previous explosion," explains Shenar. "Evidence for this ‘direct-collapse’ scenario has been emerging recently, but our study arguably provides one of the most direct indications. This has enormous implications for the origin of black-hole mergers in the cosmos."

The black hole in VFTS 243 was found using six years of observations of the Tarantula Nebula by the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) instrument on ESO’s VLT [3].

Despite the nickname ‘black hole police’, the team actively encourages scrutiny, and hopes that their work, published today in Nature Astronomy, will enable the discovery of other stellar-mass black holes orbiting massive stars, thousands of which are predicted to exist in Milky Way and in the Magellanic Clouds.

“Of course I expect others in the field to pore over our analysis carefully, and to try to cook up alternative models,” concludes El-Badry. “It's a very exciting project to be involved in.”

Notes

[1] The work was conducted in the team lead by Hugues Sana at KU Leuven’s Institute of Astronomy. 

[2] A separate study led by Laurent Mahy, involving many of the same team members and accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, reports on another promising stellar-mass black hole candidate, in the HD 130298 system in our own Milky Way galaxy.

[3] The observations used in the study cover about six years: they consist of data from the VLT FLAMES Tarantula Survey (led by Chris Evans, United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, STFC, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh; now at the European Space Agency) obtained from 2008 and 2009, and additional data from the Tarantula Massive Binary Monitoring programme (led by Hugues Sana, KU Leuven), obtained between 2012 and 2014.

More information

This research was presented in a paper titled “An X-ray quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary of the Large Magellanic Cloud” to appear in Nature Astronomy (doi: 10.1038/s41550-022-01730-y).

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement numbers 772225: MULTIPLES) (PI: Sana).

The team is composed of T. Shenar (Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Belgium [KU Leuven]; Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands [API]), H. Sana (KU Leuven), L. Mahy (Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium), K. El-Badry (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, USA [CfA]; Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, USA; Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany [MPIA]), P. Marchant (KU Leuven), N. Langer (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie der Universität Bonn, Germany, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Bonn, Germany [MPIfR]), C. Hawcroft (KU Leuven), M. Fabry (KU Leuven), K. Sen (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie der Universität Bonn, Germany,  MPIfR), L. A. Almeida (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil; Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte, Mossoró, Brazil), M. Abdul-Masih (ESO, Santiago, Chile), J. Bodensteiner (ESO, Garching, Germany), P. Crowther (Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Sheffield, UK), M. Gieles (ICREA, Barcelona, Spain; Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain), M. Gromadzki (Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw, Poland [Warsaw]), V. Henault-Brunet (Department of Astronomy and Physics, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada), A. Herrero (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain [IAC]; Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain [IAC-ULL]), A. de Koter (KU Leuven, API), P. Iwanek (Warsaw), S. Kozłowski (Warsaw), D. J. Lennon (IAC, IAC-ULL), J. Maíz Apellániz (Centro de Astrobiología, CSIC-INTA, Madrid, Spain), P. Mróz (Warsaw), A. F. J. Moffat (Department of Physics and Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Université de Montréal, Canada), A. Picco (KU Leuven), P. Pietrukowicz (Warsaw), R. Poleski (Warsaw), K. Rybicki (Warsaw and Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel), F. R. N. Schneider (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Heidelberg, Germany [HITS]; Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany), D. M. Skowron (Warsaw), J. Skowron (Warsaw), I. Soszyński (Warsaw), M. K. Szymański (Warsaw), S. Toonen (API), A. Udalski (Warsaw), K. Ulaczyk (Department of Physics, University of Warwick, UK), J. S. Vink (Armagh Observatory & Planetarium, UK), and M. Wrona (Warsaw).

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) enables scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all. We design, build and operate world-class observatories on the ground — which astronomers use to tackle exciting questions and spread the fascination of astronomy — and promote international collaboration in astronomy. Established as an intergovernmental organisation in 1962, today ESO is supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO’s headquarters and its visitor centre and planetarium, the ESO Supernova, are located close to Munich in Germany, while the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvellous place with unique conditions to observe the sky, hosts our telescopes. ESO operates three observing sites: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its Very Large Telescope Interferometer, as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. Together with international partners, ESO operates APEX and ALMA on Chajnantor, two facilities that observe the skies in the millimetre and submillimetre range. At Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, we are building “the world’s biggest eye on the sky” — ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. From our offices in Santiago, Chile we support our operations in the country and engage with Chilean partners and society. 

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Contacts

Tomer Shenar
KU Leuven and University of Amsterdam
Leuven and Amsterdam, Belgium and The Netherlands
Email: t.shenar@uva.nl

Julia Bodensteiner
European Southern Observatory
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49-89-3200-6409
Email: julia.bodensteiner@eso.org

Kareem El-Badry
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Cambridge, USA
Email: kareem.el-badry@cfa.harvard.edu

Pablo Marchant
KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium
Tel: +32 16 33 05 47
Email: pablo.marchant@kuleuven.be

Hugues Sana
KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium
Tel: +32 479 50 46 73
Email: hugues.sana@kuleuven.be

Bárbara Ferreira
ESO Media Manager
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6670
Cell: +49 151 241 664 00
Email: press@eso.org

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The MELISA project was the winning proposal of an IEEC internal competitive call that sought collaboration between the different Research Units of the Institute while stimulating the achievement of innovative projects

MELISA seeks to develop and manufacture a prototype of a compact, low-power magnetic sensor that implements magnetic field modulation using microelectromechanical resonators (MEMS)

This prototype should serve as a sample to validate the feasibility of this noise reduction technique to meet the stringent requirements of the European Space Agency's mission to detect gravitational waves in space, LISA

In December 2020, the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC — Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) published an internal competitive call to provide seed funding for a high-potential, high-impact project. The aim was to stimulate collaboration between IEEC members and groups, as well as to foster innovative proposals, allowing for feasibility studies and proofs of concept that would facilitate their maturity.

The funding came from an exceptional endowment obtained in one of the CERCA (Centres de Recerca de Catalunya) evaluations. The proposal for the call came from the IEEC direction and was approved by the CERCA Institution.

The winning project of the call was MELISA (MEMS miniaturized low-noise magnetic field sensor for LISA), proposed by members of the IEEC in three of its Research Units: the Research Group in Space Sciences and Technologies (CTE) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the Universitat de Barcelona (ICCUB). Now, a little more than a year after its award (in March 2021), the project has been completed and the results obtained are presented.

The aim of MELISA was to design a miniaturised, very low-noise magnetometer in the ultra-low frequency range used in some space missions, such as the European Space Agency (ESA) LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission, which will be the first gravitational wave observatory in space.

Manel Domínguez-Pumar, principal investigator (PI) of the project, researcher at CTE (UPC) and member of the IEEC, explains: “The aim of the MELISA project was to reduce the magnetic field noise to the level of the LISA mission requirements while achieving a miniaturisation that could be useful for other missions and even in other fields of science and technology. Thanks to the IEEC's internal call, we were able to bring together the personnel and equipment of three of its Research Units in a single project.” And he adds: “We are very happy to have won the call and to have been able to carry out this project that we have had in mind for a long time.”

In the ultra-low frequency range, when all other noise sources have been reduced or eliminated, the so-called 'pink noise', or 1/f, generally dominates and is the main challenge to address. One way to mitigate the effect of this pink noise in magnetic field sensors is through the so-called 'magnetic field modulation technique'. This is a promising technique in space applications, which consists of modulating the local magnetic field to a magnetic resistive sensor. Tunneling Magnetic Resistors (TMR)—magnetic sensors that do not require high currents and have a high potential for miniaturisation—are used in this project. By modulating the local magnetic field to the TMR, the spectral content of the signal is moved to higher frequencies, where this noise is much lower. For this purpose, a MEMS (Microelectromechanical System) resonator, in which a highly permeable ferromagnetic material is deposited, is placed close to the TMR. By exciting the MEMS resonator at its resonance frequency, the field observed by the TMR is modulated at that frequency. This avoids the low-frequency region, which is dominated by the limiting 1/f noise intrinsic to the TMR, and which degrades its performance. Finally, the acquired signal is demodulated to recover the original magnetic field signal.

“In the last phase of the project we have been characterising, in the ICE-CSIC laboratories, this device under vacuum conditions and using isolation systems of the Earth's magnetic field to measure the nanoTesla variations required by the project,” says Miquel Nofrarias, researcher at the ICE-CSIC and member of the IEEC. And he adds: “We were pleasantly surprised that this proof-of-concept reached precision values that are competitive with other commercial magnetic field measurement systems.”

Both the sensor and the acquisition electronics were developed during the project. In addition, MELISA also describes a roadmap for a future integration of the control electronics into an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), in order to achieve a miniaturisation of the sensor.

The proposed project also envisaged exploring the application of the resulting high-performance sensor in a wide range of space missions. An example of application are missions exploring planetary surfaces and cubesats in Low Earth Orbits (LEO) or other planetary bodies, since the frequency range in which measurements of currents in planetary interiors induced by interplanetary magnetic fields and solar wind are carried out is comparable to that of interest for LISA. Therefore, the magnetic field modulation achieved in MELISA and the miniaturisation of the sensors could be used in planetary exploration. Furthermore, the technology developed is expected to be cross-cutting and can also be used for precision measurements in other fields of science and technology.

About LISA

LISA is the future European gravitational-wave space observatory, which will consist of a constellation of three satellites flying in a triangular formation. Each satellite will have at its core a free-falling mass that will act as the end mirror of a 2.5 million kilometre-long interferometer. Each satellite will have about 50 high-precision temperature, magnetic field, and radiation sensors, which should be able to monitor minimum variations in the environment that could disturb the free-falling test mass. Fluctuations in the local magnetic field, for example, generate forces and torques in these test masses that can potentially alter the performance of the instrument.

The IEEC is leading the Spanish contribution to the LISA mission, which consists of providing the Science Diagnostics Subsystem (SDS). Its main objective is the precise monitoring of environmental fluctuations on board the 3 satellites (up to variations of nanoTesla, 1000 times smaller than the Earth's magnetic field), in order to distinguish between potential environmental disturbances and the effect of the passage of a gravitational wave. At European level, it is, together with the contributions from Germany, France, and Italy, one of the four largest hardware contributions.

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) has taken part on this project by the hands of the Technological Unit Team led by its director David Gascón.

Roberto Emparan, an ICREA Research Professor and Group Leader of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), was awarded the Narcís Monturiol Medal 2022 to scientific and technological merit. The Catalan Government gave these awards, instituted in 1982, to ten researchers from the Catalan educational system.

The resolution was published last Tuesday, July 5, and with it, the Catalan Government has bestowed 301 Narcís Monturiol Medals (232 to men and 69 to women) to foster scientific and technological advance.

Roberto Emparan is one of our most internationally recognized physicists in the field of gravity, black holes and superstring theories. His research focuses on the study of gravity, the structure of space-time, and black holes, in both classical and quantum aspects. He has published more than 100 research articles and given over 200 invited talks and lectures on black holes, string theory, and cosmology.

Along his career, he has broken new grounds in the physics of gravity and black holes on several occasions, creating wholly novel lines of investigation. His explorations span broad areas of modern gravitational theory, but their impact is most strongly felt at the interface between General Relativity and String Theory.

Besides academia, Prof. Emparan is also earnestly committed to meaningfully returning to society its investment in basic science. In recent years he has developed an intense activity of outreach – in a large number of public talks, press and other media, and in particular with his general-audience book “Iluminando el lado oscuro del Universo – Agujeros negros, ondas gravitatorias y otras melodías de Einstein”, published in 2018 by a major editorial house (Ariel-Planeta).

In the words of the researcher, “I have a life-long fascination with the physics of black holes, the dynamics of space and time, and gravity, and I devote my efforts to deepening our understanding of these notions which lie at the foundations of the universe. If we succeed in bringing about a fusion of them with the quantum –the pursuit of a quantum theory of gravity– we will have reached a milestone in the history of humankind: a unified conceptual basis for all of Nature”.  This distinction is an acknowledgement to years and years of scientific contributions and it will encourage the continuation of a remarkable career.

• The third release of the results of the European Space Agency Gaia mission presents the largest collection of astrophysical data on the Milky Way
• For the first time, it includes data on low-resolution and radial velocity spectroscopy
• Data on binary stars surpass the scientific work carried out during the last two centuries
• The new Gaia data catalogue includes information on the population of asteroids of the Solar System which is key for studying the origins of this planetary system 

Barcelona, June 13, 2022. The largest collection of astrophysical data for stars of the Milky Way, a catalogue of binary stars that surpasses all the scientific work from the past two centuries and the first low-resolution and radial velocity spectroscopy studies carried out to date: these are some of the scientific findings of the third catalogue release of the Gaia mission, published by the European Space Agency (ESA) on Monday, June 13.

Since its beginning, Gaia has counted on the participation of a team of astronomers and engineers of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), led by researchers Carme Jordi, Xavier Luri and Francesca Figueras, from the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics (UB-ICCUB-IEEC).

This new data release, which includes a total of 1.8 billion stars of the Milky Way, provides the international astronomic collective with an unprecedented perspective of stellar characteristics and their life cycle, as well as the structure and evolution of the Galaxy. The published data of the Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) were collected during thirty-four months, between July 25, 2014 and May 28, 2017.

Since the launch of Gaia in 2013, data sets have been released in 2016 and 2018, as well as a subgroup of the third data set in 2020. For the moment, the Gaia mission exceeds the 2,850 days of sky observation, it has collected 100 terabytes of data and has documented 200-billion-star transits in its focal plane.

Gaia Mission: the most accurate map of our galaxy

Gaia is the ESA’s emblematic mission launched in December 2013 to create the most accurate and complete multi-dimensional map of our galaxy —the Milky Way—, with data on the position, speed and direction of motion, brightness, temperature and composition of nearly two billion galactic and extragalactic objects. This information will allow astronomers to rebuild the past and future evolution of the Galaxy over billions of years.

The largest low-resolution spectroscopy study ever 

The Gaia satellite, located 1.5 million away from the Earth in the opposite direction to the Sun in the Lagrange L2 point, has surveyed the sky through two telescopes which have provided scientific data to calculate the position, distance, speeds and physical features of nearly 2 billion stars.  

One of the first scientific indications of the dataset now published are the light spectra of 220 million stars, which can be used to determine brightness, temperature, mass and chemical compositions with precision. As noted by Professor Carme Jordi, “for the first time, we can separate in detail the light we receive from the stars and that from other objects observed by Gaia”. The expert adds that “this separation provides us with knowledge on the physical properties such as temperature, brightness and chemical composition, which is essential information for determining the age of the stars and deduce their origins”.

Gaia DR3 includes the radial velocity of 33 million stars, a volume of information five times higher to the one the second data set of the mission provided in 2018. The radial velocity is the speed to which the objects distance from us or get closer, a parameter that is brought by the third dimension of speed in the Gaia map of our galaxy.

As Professor Xavier Luri says, “the number of measurements is, by far, larger than the total measures of radial velocity conducted from Earth in all history. This is already a radical change in data availability”. Luri also notes that “having the third motion component (the other two are provided by astrometry, through the own motions measured by Gaia) enables us to make a complete analysis of the kinematics of the stars. Overall, the volume, quality and completeness of data opens new perspectives for understanding the kinematics and dynamics of our galaxy”.

The largest catalogue of binary stars to date

Another novelty of the dataset is that it has the largest catalogue of binary stars of the Milky Way to date. With positions, distances, orbits and masses of more than 800,000 systems, this catalogue is key for understanding the stellar evolution. Moreover, Gaia DR3 has essential information for studying the origins of the Solar System. Specifically, data on 156,000 asteroids of this solar system, information of great precision which combines compositions and orbits.

The great volume of data Gaia offers to the international astronomic collective provides unprecedented views on the understanding of the characteristics of the stars and their life cycle, as well as on the study of the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. The data now presented include information on the stars with a brightness which varies over time, in addition to objects from the Solar System —asteroids and planetary moons— and galaxies and quasars beyond the Galaxy in which we find ourselves.

“As seen in previous data releases, the most unexpected and surprising findings will arrive during the following weeks, as soon as we distinguishing the secrets these data have; these data have been open to the professional community and amateurs since the beginning”, notes lecturer Francesca Figueras. “We are watching millions of eclipsing binary stars moving and beating, as well as thousands of pulsating cepheids, stellar populations that trace the distance of the universe. We also capture the non-radial pulsations of variable stars in rapid rotation, small tsunamis in its surface. These are only some examples, I cannot imagine the euphoria and passion Henrietta Swan Leavitt would feel now”. 

A scientific collaboration since the beginning of the space mission

The role of the UB-ICCUB-IEEC team focused on the scientific and technological design of the project, the development of the data processing system and on the production of simulated data. A part of the software for data processing sent by the satellite has been developed by the UB-ICCUB-IEEC team and is carried out by the MareNostrum computer, from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).  

The team members work on the scientific exploitation of data, in fields such as the study of the spiral structure of the Galaxy; identification of past interactions of the Milky Way with near galaxies, which are essential for knowing its evolution to present times; open clusters, including the identification of unknown clusters to date; and the study of the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies orbiting in our galaxy.

“With each new release, the data accuracy and its volume improve. In the upcoming years, we will have, for instance, 150 million high-resolution spectra with more accurate distance and motions. The results we will obtain from the analysis of these data are unpredictable, but they will allow us, among other things, to better understand the evolution of the Galaxy, or its structure”, notes lecturer Eduard Massana.    

The Gaia team at ICCUB (UB-IEEC), led by Professor Jordi Torra at the beginning of the mission, was awarded in 2013 the Barcelona City Award in the category of Experimental Sciences and Technology. Some of its members are part of the Gaia Science Team (GST), ESA’s scientific advisory body. Fuel consumption leads to the prediction that Gaia is expected to operate until 2025, and that the final catalogue will not come out before 2030.

Further information:

Press Office
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●       The Galactic RainCloudS project, led by the University of Barcelona and with the participation of the private sector by the hand of Pervasive Technologies, Google Cloud and Telefónica, was awarded the first position in the European project OCRE “Cloud Funding for Research”.

●       Galactic RainCloudS is a pioneer initiative in Europe in the use of Computational Infrastructures on the Cloud for research on astronomy, aimed at showing the benefits of the use of resources on the cloud for the scientific community.

●        The combination of the extraordinary volume of data from the Gaia Satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) with the increasing computational power and flexibility of cloud infrastructures and data mining techniques, will allow researchers at the UB to study the existing links between past galaxy collisions and star formation in a holistic way, using the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies as a giant experimental laboratory.

Barcelona, fourth of May of 2022.      The Galactic RainCloudS project, led by members of the Faculty of Physics, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) and the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), was awarded the first position in the framework of the Cloud Funding for Research call of the European project Open Clouds For Research Environments (OCRE).

The project competed against 27 other proposals from twelve countries and in a wide range of research disciplines. This first edition of “Cloud Funding For Research” will fund the use of commercial computational cloud resources for research. The project counts with the collaboration of the private sector by the hand of Pervasive Technologies, who are bringing their expertise on artificial intelligence and cloud computation to the table, Google Cloud, that is providing the gCloud computational infrastructure and Telefónica, who will contribute to the project with their expertise on cloud resources management. Xavier Luri, director of the ICCUB and primary investigator of the project, remarks: “the Galactic RainCloudS project is pioneer in Europe on the use of Cloud Computational Infrastructures for research in astronomy, and it has been conceived with the objective of proving the advantages of the use of cloud resources for the scientific community”.

The key to the project lies in its interdisciplinary nature: the combination of the huge volumes of data from the Gaia Satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) with the increasing computational power and flexibility of cloud infrastructures and data mining techniques, will allow researchers at the University of Barcelona to study the existing links between past galaxy collisions and stellar formation in a holistic way, using the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies as a giant experimental laboratory. “Cloud computing is like renting a series of powerful computers that are tailored to your specific necessities for a certain period of time which will allow us to perform all the necessary calculations to study the interaction among galaxies”, says Mercè Romero, ICCUB-IEEC researcher.

The project also includes the development of a system to detect traces of past collisions of small galaxies with the halo of our Galaxy. In the words of Teresa Antoja, a ICCUB-IEEC researcher, “the existence of granularities in the galactic halos is predicted by the current cosmological model of the formation of our Universe. The active search of these kinds of substructures among the Gaia data can provide crucial information about the history of the Milky Way, even about the nature of Dark Matter”.

The participation of the private sector in the project shows the affinity between research and industry in the use of cutting-edge technologies and their shared interests, “in Pervasive Technologies we are very happy to share our knowledge of Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computation in this project that is pioneer in the research world. We will strive to obtain the best outputs from the Cloud infrastructures and Artificial Intelligence in this project”, says Rodolfo Lomascolo, CEO of Pervasive Technologies.

In order to be successful, the Galactic RainCloudS project must have, among other features, big data infrastructures. Roger Mor, a ML Data Scientist at Pervasive Technologies and external collaborator of the ICCUB, mentions that “the Gaia satellite data hide the keys to many of the questions that we want to answer. However, we need the proper tools to be able to retrieve them. The Big Data platforms available on commercial Cloud services and Artificial Intelligence will be key assets to discern, for instance, if the interaction between Sagittarius and the Milky Way was the cause of the reigniting of star formation in our Galaxy between 5.000 and 7.000 years ago, as it is pointed by some studies”.

“Telefónica has accompanied the University of Barcelona in the definition and deployment of the Google Cloud architecture, where the required hypercomputation solution to tackle the project will be hosted. The deployed infrastructure will allow massive data processing and analysis in a way that is flexible, scalable and tailored to the specific necessities of the researchers of the University of Barcelona. Telefónica will remain beside the UB throughout the process to guarantee the success of the implementation with teams specialized in Google Cloud services and technologies”, explains Enrique González Lezana, Head of Cloud Sales Specialist at Telefónica Tech.

The project has kicked-off this month of May, and it will last for a year, “the Galactic RainCloudS project is a necessary step in the transition of the research world toward the use of efficient computational Cloud resources. In this sense, we are pioneers in their adoption at the University of Barcelona and we hope that our experience will foster their usage. The research teams needs are getting more specific every day, so we want to focus all of our efforts to make this project open the doors to commercial Cloud computation for many other future projects in all research fields”, concludes Xavier Luri.

 References:

 OCRE: https://www.ocre-project.eu/
Cloud Funding for research: https://www.ocre-project.eu/news-insights/news/cloud-funding-awarded-ocre-15-innovative-research-projects
Cloud OCRE provider list: https://www.ocre-project.eu/services/cloud-suppliers/country/spain

 About the Institute of Cosmos Sciences
The Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) is a research institute belonging to the University of Barcelona, created on 2006 and awarded with the Excellence Accreditation María de Maeztu on 2015. It is one of the four units forming the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC). The centre is dedicated to fundamental research in the fields of cosmology and particle physics, as well as technological applications of the cosmos sciences in general. Most of its members are professors and researchers of the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics of the Physics Faculty, and it counts with ten ICREA researchers. Currently, it has three European Research Council grants and it participates in thirteen European projects. Among its performance indicators for the 2014-2017 time period, one can highlight the publication of 1.062 articles in indexed journals, 86,35% of which belong to the first quartile. Regarding knowledge transfer, it has generated two patents and two spin-offs. 

About the University of Barcelona

The University of Barcelona is the main public university of Catalonia and one of the most prestigious higher-education institutions in all the state. The UB, founded in 1450, is the only Spanish university to be part of the League of European Research Universities (LERU), an association that gathers the 23 most important university research centres in the continent. The UB ranks among the 100 best universities in the world, according to the Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR). On 2016, The Times Higher Education included the UB among the 25 best universities with more than 400 years of history. The University of Barcelona offers a varied educational offer, which comprehends 48 doctorate programmes, 151 official university master’s degrees and 74 bachelor’s degrees. It has more than 44.000 students, 15% of which come from 122 different countries. The University of Barcelona values academic excellence as it has a strong commitment to provide the future generations of citizens with the ability to work at the highest level anywhere in the world.

 About Pervasive Technologies

 Pervasive Technologies is a company specialised in the development of smart solutions for a diverse range of sectors, such as industry, retail or manufacturing, by using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. We develop image and video recognition solutions that allow companies to classify, localize and detect information, improving the safety and efficiency of businesses and industries with the automation brought by AI. This way, we help companies tackle their challenging and complex evolutions. In Pervasive Technologies, we are partners with Google, NVIDIA, ADLINK Technology and Arrow Electronics.