• Dr. Ferré-Mateu is one of the hundred researchers selected from around the world

• Homeward Bound project is a transformational leadership initiative for women with a background in STEMM from around the world

• The program will conclude with a three-week on-board ship voyaging to Antarctica

Dr. Ferré-Mateu, researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), will be part of the sixth program along with a hundred researchers. The 12-month program comprises lectures, personal and leadership development tools, coaching sessions, visibility, training and the opportunity to develop meaningful collaborations – in forums, in teams with a focus on areas of interest, and in small diverse cohorts ending with a three-week on-board ship voyaging to Antarctica.

‘For me this journey to Antarctica represents the challenges we face as individuals and as a society.', commented Dr. Ferré-Mateu. ' Before we can think about reaching new worlds, we need to start taking care of our own, and I hope that the tools learnt during this journey will have an impact on the way we do science. It is one of the greatest adventures ever and I’m just thrilled to be part of it!’, she added.

What is the Homeward Bound project?

The Homeward Bound project was created in Australia in 2016. This project aims to build a global collaboration of 1000 women with backgrounds in STEMM for over ten years so they have the opportunity to take up leadership roles globally and to proactively contribute to a sustainable world, both individually and collectively. They will be visible, collaborative, networked and impacting the decisions made in many quarters for the greater good.

Who is Dr. Ferré Mateu?

Dr. Ferré Mateu’s research has been focused on the study of the cosmic evolution of galaxies of different types. They are a crucial building block to constrain the current galaxy formation and evolution paradigm. Moreover, to some degree, they are also a crucial piece of understanding a bit better the most fundamental question of human beings: where do we come from?

For this, she has been studying the fossil record of the stars in galaxies, to understand how they were and how they have evolved over cosmic time, in a similar way an archaeologist would reveal how the ancient populations lived by examining their remains. This quest has taken her to live, literally, all around the globe: the Canaries, Hawaii and Australia. This has allowed her to carry her science in forefront facilities while enjoying the wonders of such places by doing her favourite hobbies such as surfing, diving, hiking and traveling. Since 2018, Dr. Ferré-Mateu holds a Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowship at our institute, where she is one of the members of the Galaxy Structure and Evolution research group.

Her contribution to disseminating science to younger generations and advocating for women equity has become a very important part of her work participating in chats and events like Chatea con una Astrónoma motivating young girls into pursuing STEM careers or being part of "Journey through the Universe" that brings astronomy to the classrooms in Hilo, Hawaii.

You can follow her journey to Antarctica on Twitter or Instagram on the hashtag #AnnetainAntarctica.hb6 and her Instagram account @annetainantarctica.hb6

Links:

Dr. Ferré Mateu’s website

Homeward Bound project

Institute of Cosmos Sciences

Outreach events

Contacts:

ICCUB Communication Office

Barcelona, Spain

Esther Pallares

E-mail: secretariacientifica@icc.ub.edu

Dr. Anna Ferré Mateu

Barcelona, Spain

Institute of Cosmos Sciences

E-mail: aferremateu@icc.ub.edu

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the Universitat de Barcelona will use the December 2020 Early Data Release 3 (EDR3) of the European Space Agency mission Gaia to investigate Milky Way star formation and its interaction with its satellite galaxies, employing OCRE’s cloud resources for data mining, N-body simulations, and Bayesian techniques on the Gaia catalogue containing 1.8 billion sources.

Fifteen innovative research projects will benefit from commercial cloud solutions through EU cloud project Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE), demonstrating the effectiveness of cloud services in research.

€1.175 million will be distributed to the successful applicants, each receiving between €50,000 and €100,000. In its first call for the adoption of the cloud services available through the OCRE IaaS+ framework agreements, OCRE received 31 applications. All applications were screened by the OCRE cloud adoption funding team and overseen by the OCRE External Advisory Board.

The distribution of cloud adoption funding is a key milestone in OCRE’s goal of piloting a digital single market for cloud and digital services for European research. The research projects will be able to benefit from 27 different commercial cloud-based platforms that were sourced through the OCRE IaaS+ Tender concluded mid-2020 and will be made available in the OCRE Service Catalogue in the first quarter of2021.

Through this single procurement, thousands of research institutions across the European Research Area will be able to benefit from easy and procurement regulation-compliant access to commercial cloud services.

OCRE Adoption Funding Lead Jan Meijer (Uninett)said, “thanks to the good response to the call for projects we managed to assemble a balanced portfolio of 15 projects; showcasing the benefits of commercial cloud services on research outcomes from different angles. Our hope is that these showcases will inspire other researchers to follow in their footsteps and leverage the benefits of the OCRE portfolio of services for their research.”

More information about Gaia here.

• The new data allow us to determine that the ancient disc had a smaller extent compared to the Milky Way’s current disc size.

• Gaia provides the first measurement of the curvature of the Solar System’s orbit around the galaxy in the history of optical astronomy.

• The Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars has been released containing around 92 percent of the stars within 100 parsecs (326 light years) of the Sun.

The motion of stars in the outskirts of our galaxy hints at significant changes in the history of the Milky Way. This and other equally fascinating results come from a set of papers that demonstrate the quality of ESA’s Gaia Early third Data Release (EDR3), which is made public today.

Astronomers from the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) saw the evidence of the Milky Way’s past by looking at stars in the direction of the Galaxy’s ‘anticentre’. This is in the exact opposite direction on the sky from the centre of the galaxy.

The results on the anticentre come from one of the four ‘demonstration papers’ released alongside the Gaia data. The others use Gaia data to provide a huge extension to the census of nearby stars, derive the shape of the Solar System’s orbit around the centre of the Galaxy, and probe structures in two nearby galaxies to the Milky Way. The papers are designed to highlight the improvements and quality of the newly published data.

Join the events organized to celebrate the early gaia data release 3

To the galactic anticentre

The new Gaia data have allowed astronomers to trace the various populations of older and younger stars out towards the very edge of our galaxy – the galactic anticentre. Computer models predicted that the disc of the Milky Way will grow larger with time as new stars are born. The new data allow us to see the relics of the 10 billion-year-old ancient disc and so determine its smaller extent compared to the Milky Way’s current disc size.

The new data from these outer regions also strengthen the evidence for another major event in the more recent past of the galaxy.

The data show that in the outer regions of the disc there is a component of slow-moving stars above the plane of our galaxy that are heading downwards towards the plane, and a component of fast-moving stars below the plane that are moving upwards. This extraordinary pattern had not been anticipated before. It could be the result of the near-collision between the Milky Way and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy that took place in our galaxy’s more recent past.

The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy contains a few tens of millions of stars and is currently in the process of being cannibalised by the Milky Way. Its last close pass to our galaxy was not a direct hit, but this would have been enough so that its gravity perturbed some stars in our galaxy like a stone dropping into water.

Using Gaia DR2, members of DPAC had already found a subtle ripple in the movement of millions of stars that suggested the effects of the encounter with Sagittarius sometime between 300 and 900 million years ago. Now, using Gaia EDR3, they have uncovered more evidence that points to its strong effects on our galaxy’s disc of stars.

“The patterns of movement in the disc stars are different to what we used to believe,” says Teresa Antoja, researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, who worked on this analysis with DPAC colleagues. Although the role of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is still debated in some quarters, Teresa says, “It could be a good candidate for all these disturbances, as some simulations from other authors show.”

Measuring the Solar System’s orbit

The history of the galaxy is not the only result from the Gaia EDR3 demonstration papers. DPAC members across Europe have performed other work to demonstrate the extreme fidelity of the data and the unique potential for unlimited scientific discovery.

In one paper, Gaia has allowed scientists to measure the acceleration of the Solar System with respect to the rest frame of the Universe. Using the observed motions of extremely distant galaxies, the velocity of the Solar System has been measured to change by 0.23 nm/s every second. Because of this tiny acceleration, the trajectory of the Solar System is deflected by the diameter of an atom every second, and in a year this adds up to around 115 km. The acceleration measured by Gaia shows a good agreement with the theoretical expectations and provides the first measurement of the curvature of the Solar System’s orbit around the galaxy in the history of optical astronomy.

A new stellar census

Gaia EDR3 has also allowed a new census of stars in the solar neighbourhood to be obtained. The Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars contains 331 312 objects, which is estimated to be 92 percent of the stars within 100 parsecs (326 light years) of the Sun. The previous census of the solar neighbourhood, called the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby stars, was carried out in 1957. It possessed just 915 objects initially, but was updated in 1991 to 3803 celestial objects. It was also limited to a distance of 82 light years: Gaia’s census reaches four times farther and contains 100 times more stars. It also provides location, motion, and brightness measurements that are orders of magnitude more precise than the old data.

Beyond the Milky Way

A fourth demonstration paper analysed the Magellanic Clouds: two galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. Having measured the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud’s stars to greater precision than before, Gaia EDR3 clearly shows that the galaxy has a spiral structure. The data also resolve a stream of stars that is being pulled out of the Small Magellanic Cloud, and hints at previously unseen structures in the outskirts of both galaxies.

At 12:00 CET on 3 December, the data produced by the many scientists and engineers of the Gaia DPAC Consortium become public for anyone to look at and learn from. This is the first of a two-part release; the full Data Release 3 is planned for 2022.

“Gaia EDR3 is the result of a huge effort from everyone involved in the Gaia mission. It’s an extraordinarily rich data set, and I look forward to the many discoveries that astronomers from around the world will make with this resource,” says Timo Prusti, ESA’s Gaia Project Scientist. “And we’re not done yet; more great data will follow as Gaia continues to make measurements from orbit.”

Gaia Mission

The Gaia satellite, which was launched in December 2013, is destined to create the most accurate map of the Milky Way. By making accurate measurements of the positions and motions of stars in the Milky Way, it is answering questions about the origin and evolution of our home galaxy.

Gaia EDR3 contains detailed information on more than 1.8 billion sources, detected by the Gaia spacecraft. This represents an increase of more than 100 million sources over the previous data release (Gaia DR2), which was made public in April 2018. Gaia EDR3 also contains colour information for around 1.5 billion sources, an increase of about 200 million sources over Gaia DR2. As well as including more sources, the general accuracy and precision of the measurements has also improved.

Participation of the Barcelona team

The ICCUB team (UB-IEEC), led by Professor Carme Jordi and professors Xavier Luri and Francesca Figueras, from the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics, has participated in the Gaia mission from the beginning. Their role was focused on the scientific and technological design of the project, the development of the data processing system and the production of simulated data.

Regarding the now presented data, the Barcelona team coordinates the group that has developed the archive of the mission. It is also responsible for running several key processes for processing the data that arrives daily from the satellite, the first step in obtaining results for scientific use such as those now published. The group is also responsible for the process of pairing the various observations of the same star, and it collaborates in the calibration of star photometry and is fully involved in the scientific exploitation of the data. Finally, the Catalan researchers have played an important role in the performance verification papers, articles that are published together with the data and which verify their quality. Specifically, they have led four of these articles and have played a significant part in much of the rest.

The ICCUB Gaia team (UB-IEEC), made up of about thirty scientists and engineers, was awarded the 2013 City of Barcelona Award for Experimental Sciences and Technology. It is part of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, made up of more than 400 people from around twenty European countries, and leads the creation of the archive of the mission. Some of its members are part of the Gaia Science Team (GST), the ESA scientific advisory body.

More information:

• Gaia's webpage
• ICCUB's Gaia Team webpage
• Gaia ICCUB team detects a shake in the Milky Way
• Memory game
• Coloquio-tertulia sobre los datos de gaia - EDR3
• Gaia, la Galaxia en tus manos
• Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB)
• Teresa Antoja's webpage

Verification papers:
Gaia Early Data Release 3: The Gaia catalogue of nearby stars Gaia Collaboration, Smart, R.L., et al.
Gaia Early Data Release 3: Structure and properties of the Magellanic Clouds Gaia Collaboration, Luri, X., et al.
Gaia Early Data Release 3: The Galactic anticentre Gaia Collaboration, Antoja, T., et al.
Gaia Early Data Release 3: Acceleration of the solar system from Gaia astrometry Gaia Collaboration, Klioner, S.A., et al.

This Thursday, December 3, at 12 noon, the European Space Agency (ESA) will make a new data release from the Gaia mission with more than 1.8 billion observed objects. This is one of the great milestones expected by the astronomical community worldwide.

The different teams that make up the Gaia project will organize scientific seminars to explain the first obtained results and the lessons learned with the Gaia data, as well as a breakthrough in science that is beginning to appear. Data Processing and Analysis Consortium team (DPAC), which brings together more than 400 experts, is organizing an online meeting aimed at the scientific community, which will be coordinated by members of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB).

Getting to know Gaia better: disseminative conference and memory game

On the same day, December 3, at 7 p.m., there will be an informative conference aimed at the general public, given by ICCUB researchers Josep Manel Carrasco and Mercè Romero. In the conference, they will explain how astronomy is revolutionizing the Gaia satellite, which provides unpublished clues about the origin and evolution of our galaxy, the Milky Way. They will describe the mission and explain Gaia’s strategy to observe the Universe by analysing the latest discoveries.

Also, the ICCUB team has created a Gaia memory game, which can be downloaded and printed, or played online. The twenty images in the game correspond to the space mission and are accompanied by descriptive texts.

Participation of the Barcelona team

TheICCUB team(UB-IEEC), led by Professor Carme Jordi and professors Xavier Luri and Francesca Figueras, from the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics, has participated in the Gaia mission from the beginning. Their role was focused on the scientific and technological design of the project, the development of the data processing system and the production of simulated data.

Regarding the now presented data, the Barcelona team coordinates the group that has developed the archive of the mission. It is also responsible for running several key processes for processing the data that arrives daily from the satellite, the first step in obtaining results for scientific use such as those now published. The group is also responsible for the process of pairing the various observations of the same star, and it collaborates in the calibration of star photometry and is fully involved in the scientific exploitation of the data. Finally, the Catalan researchers have played an important role in the performance verification papers, articles that are published together with the data and which verify their quality. Specifically, they have led four of these articles and have played a significant part in much of the rest.

The ICCUB Gaia team (UB-IEEC), made up of about thirty scientists and engineers, was awarded the 2013 City of Barcelona Award for Experimental Sciences and Technology. It is part of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, made up of more than 400 people from around twenty European countries, and leads the creation of the archive of the mission. Some of its members are part of the Gaia Science Team (GST), the ESA scientific advisory body.

Quick flashes of light in the night sky have been linked to the growing mass of satellites and debris zipping around Earth’s orbit.

The orbital flashes, often mistaken for stars, occur 1,000 times an hour, according to new research led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that may improve the accuracy of astronomical data.

Stargazers have long been tantalized by the inexplicable glimmers and the study published Nov. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters provides a potential explanation for those mysterious flashes.

Most of the flashes require powerful telescopes for viewing, but up to 100 of them are bright enough to see with the naked eye in a suburban community.

“Astronomical surveys have seen occasional reflected light glints from satellites; those flashes can cause false alarms in surveys looking for new events in the sky,” said lead study author Hank Corbett, graduate student at the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Physics and Astronomy.

“For the first time, we have studied the flashes in a systematic way that will help reduce their impact on astronomical discoveries.”

The team at UNC-Chapel Hill, along with collaborators from San Diego State University and the University of Barcelona, reported more than 100,000 flashes over a six-month period.

The flashes were observed with the Evryscopes, telescopes in California and Chile constructed and funded by the National Science Foundation. The pair of robotic, gigapixel-camera telescopes observe the entire sky above their observatories every two minutes.

“These measurements allow us to predict the impact of reflected-light flashes on both current and future professional observatories and develop techniques to mitigate their effects on data,” Corbett said.

The orbital flashes are reflected not only from the satellites relied on for navigation, communication, weather forecasting, and more, but also from space trash such as dead satellites, paint chips and errant nuts and bolts that has accumulated since space exploration began six decades ago.

These short duration flashes can be indistinguishable from stars in images from professional observatories and are typically visible for only a fraction of a second.

“Millions of stargazers have likely observed these quick glimmers of light in the night sky,” Corbett said. “Reflected-light flashes happen so fast that observers may dismiss them as visual noise, but this research provides a potential explanation for those mysterious flashes.

Rogue reflections from Earth satellites take two forms: short duration flashes that can lead to mistaken astrophysical events and streaks associated with fast-moving or slowly rotating satellites like SpaceX Starlink.

Companies are competing to launch thousands of satellites capable of beaming internet coverage to Earth. However, in the new study, researchers conclude that the upcoming satellite internet constellations, like SpaceX Starlink, are unlikely to contribute significantly to the appearance of flashes, though there are other potential impacts of satellite constellations on astronomers.

Bright streaks caused by sun-illuminated satellites moving across an image are a separate class of events that needs to be studied.

Additional authors include Nicholas Law, Alan Vasquez, Ward S. Howard, Amy Glazier, Ramses Gonzalez, Jeffrey Ratzloff and Nathan Galliher, all of UNC-Chapel Hill, Octavi Fors of UNC-Chapel Hill and University of Barcelona and Robert Quimby of San Diego State University and University of Tokyo.

The classification and definitive analysis of the 39 events detected by Virgo and LIGO in the third observation period (which ran from April to October 2019) was published today on the ArXiv online archive. Most of these are black hole mergers, the characteristics of which, however, question some established astrophysical models and open up new scenarios. A likely merger of neutron stars and two probable 'mixed' neutron star-black hole systems were also detected in the same period.

It took a year of work and complex analysis by the researchers of the Virgo and LIGO scientific collaborations to complete the study of all of the gravitational-wave signals that were recorded by the Virgo interferometer, installed at the European Gravitational Observatory, in Italy, and the two LIGO detectors, in the US, during the data-taking period - called 'O3a' - which ran from the 1st of April to the 1st of October, 2019. Events included: 36 mergers of black holes; a likely merger of a binary system of neutron stars; and two systems that were most likely composed of a black hole and a neutron star. Among these, four "exceptional events" have, during the last year, already been published, but the catalogue released today provides, for the first time, a complete picture of the extraordinarily large number of recorded gravitational-wave signals and their sources. It represents a wealth of observations and data on the physics of black holes, barely imaginable until only a few years ago.

"Since the end of the O2 observing run in August 2017, many efforts have been made to upgrade many of the technical components and different sectors of the detector, in order to boost the Virgo sensitivity across the whole frequency range", said Ilaria Nardecchia, a researcher at the University of Roma Tor Vergata and member of the Virgo Collaboration. "We reaped the benefits of our work because we doubled the sensitivity of the detector!"

Indeed, between September 2017, and April 2019, the sensitivity of the three detectors has been significantly improved. This has led, for example, to Virgo becoming capable of observing a volume of the universe almost ten times larger than in the previous observational run (O2).

"Observations with Advanced Virgo and LIGO have exceeded expectations. As well as opening a new and exciting phase in the history of human observation of the cosmos, we are seeing events that either lacked observational evidence until now, or go beyond our current understanding of stellar evolution", said Ed Porter, directeur de recherche CNRS at APC-Paris, and member of the Virgo Collaboration. "Just five years after the first detection of gravitational waves, we can say that gravitational astronomy is a concrete reality."

The detection of gravitational signals allows us, in fact, for the first time, to closely observe the dynamics of extraordinary mergers of black holes and neutron stars, which release bursts of energy equivalent to several solar masses in gravitational waves. This allows us to study, as never before, the physics of black holes, the cosmic phenomena that generate them and even the characteristics of the largest populations of black holes. Actually, the results of the present catalogue raise serious questions about the validity of some of the astrophysical scenarios and models, which until now seemed the most plausible.

In particular, the masses of black holes, presented in the O3a catalogue, question various theoretical and observational limits on the mass ranges of black hole populations. Some observations, for example, indicate the presence of compact objects (which could be either black holes or neutron stars) exactly in the gap between the mass of the heaviest neutron stars and that of the lightest black holes observed by astronomers to date. This gap could therefore narrow or even disappear. Other observed black holes have a mass with a value between 65 and 120 solar masses; a range forbidden by stellar evolution models. According to these models, the very massive stars, beyond a certain threshold, are completely disrupted by the supernova explosion, due to a process called pair instability, and leave behind only gas and cosmic dust. The existence of black holes in the range prohibited by pair instability suggests other mechanisms of black hole formation, such as the merger of smaller black holes or the collision of massive stars, but may also indicate the need to revise our description of the final stages of the lives of stars.

The publication of the O3a catalogue is the conclusion of complex work involving many phases and covering detector calibration, data characterisation and data analysis. The catalogue for each observation run is only published once researchers have the final validated dataset, thus making it possible to estimate the physical parameters (such as distance, mass and spins) of the black-hole and neutron-star mergers, as well as a confident estimate of their margins of error. Of the 39 events presented in this latest catalogue, 26 were announced immediately after detection, while 13 are reported for the first time in the paper published today. These add to the 11 gravitational-wave events reported by LIGO and Virgo for the previous runs (O1 and O2). In addition to the LIGO-Virgo events catalogue, three other articles have also been released today on the arXiv server: the global analysis of the astrophysical properties of the gravitational-waves sources; new tests of the theory of general relativity; and the search for gravitational-wave signals coincident with gamma-ray bursts."

"These papers are very important and represent a further step forward in a long and exciting journey", said Giovanni Losurdo, INFN researcher and spokesperson for the Virgo Collaboration. "We are already looking forward to the results of the second part of the third observation period (O3b). The very high number of events still to analyse and understand promises that the next catalogue will be as exciting, if not more so, than this one. Meanwhile, we are striving to implement a substantial upgrade of the Virgo detector, aiming to pursue the next run, in 2022, again with a considerably improved sensitivity."

Citizen-science projects for gravitational-wave data-analysis

Two citizen-science projects, Gravity Spy for LIGO and the European project, REINFORCE for Virgo, allow everyone to contribute to the identification of spurious signals and therefore to the discovery of new gravitational-waves signals, by collaborating directly with researchers involved in the analysis of the data of the three interferometers.

In fact, although external as well as internal noise sources are minimised, the data taken by the interferometers are still plagued by some disturbances. In some cases, these are monitored by witness sensors and are then subtracted from the data in real-time. Nevertheless, the identification of other noises is more problematic and requires off-line dedicated analysis in order to flag them. This is the case with glitchy noises; those that are generated, for instance, by light scattered off the main laser beam and that then recombine with it. The careful studies required to claim a true gravitational-wave signal explain why the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations issue alerts of a candidate event to the scientific community soon after it has been measured. This can then either be confirmed by subsequent analysis and hence considered a true signal or not. Thanks to Gravity Spy and REINFORCE, citizen scientists can help researchers in this complex analysis work by directly accessing the data detected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers.

Link to papers:

• Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• Population properties of compact objects from the second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• Tests of General Relativity with Binary Black Holes from the second LIGO–Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
• Search for Gravitational Waves Associated with Gamma-Ray Bursts detected by Fermi and Swift during the LIGO-Virgo Run O3a

Image caption: The image shows sky localisations for the different LIGO-Virgo detections that are included in the O3a catalogue. Each localisation - represented by shaded areas on the map - is deduced on the basis of information provided by the three detectors in the network. The day and time of arrival on Earth, a scientific name and the time it took the signal to reach the Earth from wherever in the Universe it was generated, are all recorded. The smaller the shaded area in the sky map, the better the signal has been localised. Localisation is crucial in enabling follow-up searches with different messengers, such as light or neutrinos.

• The announcement is made in light of the recent approval of the preliminary draft of the Spanish government’s budget which announces an investment of more than five billion euros in science
• The signatories demand a national pact that includes long-term strategies aimed at promoting frontier science and business innovation
• The document aims to add and provide strategic solutions to the recent Pact for Science and Innovation that the Government has just announced

SOMMa, ASEICA and AseBio, entities that together account for almost ten thousand researchers across the public and private sector, dozens of research centres and nearly 300 leading Spanish companies in the biotechnology sector, join their voices to urge the political class to transform the country. More than 40 organisations supporting stronger support for science and innovation have signed a document that calls for Spain to reach and exceed 2.5% investment in R&D by 2027 and radically change its current economic model.

The signatories consider this is a crucial moment of putting R&D at the centre of Spain’s future strategy for a sustainable and resilient recovery. It is a unique window of opportunity presented by yesterday’s preliminary draft of the state’s new general budget, the European Reconstruction Plan, the "Green Deal" and the missions of the new Horizon Europe Framework Program of the European Union.

Furthermore, the public has been able to grasp the need to have a solid research capacity for the challenges we are currently facing. Despite this, Spain invests just 1.24% of its GDP in R&D, a figure much lower than the EU average (2.12%), and far from countries such as Germany, Denmark or Austria (around 3%).

The call for action proposes a broad range of administrative and legal recommendations, as well as the implementation of strategic actions so that science and innovation act as the engines for the recovery of the country. The transformation of the economic model would counterbalance the dependence of sectors heavily affected by the current pandemic, giving Spain new opportunities and a stronger position for the future. Crystallizing the great Spanish potential in R&D would lay the foundations for a solid recovery through a sustainable, competitive economic model based on providing high added value.

“The current context has abruptly exposed the shortcomings of our economic model. Spain is thought to be one of the advanced economies most affected by the pandemic, making it essential to change the foundations of our economic model before we can regrow. This is a turning point which we cannot back away from, as it is only through a new economic model that we can ensure the future of Spain. Taking urgent action through the state’s general budget is just the starting point. A state pact for R&D is necessary now more than ever." Luis Serrano, president of SOMMa and director of the Centre for Genomic Regulation.

“Covid-19 has revealed what we have been warning for a long time: the urgent need to invest in science and innovation to ensure the health of our citizens and to develop an economy based on knowledge, not entertainment. We must take the bull by the horns: we need stable long-term plans and short-term solutions to meet these challenges. Let's say it once again: research is not a luxury, it is the only way we have to ensure the health and quality of life of our fellow citizens. And this does not depend on ideologies, it is a project that cuts across all divides”. Xosé Bustelo, President of ASEICA.

“This appeal to our political representatives, to the administration and to society itself, is nothing but a joint demand for a long-term strategy that promotes science and innovation in our country and places them at the heart of its strategy. Innovative companies and entities are committed to this effort if we have an adequate and stable framework that allows us to work collaboratively with the rest of the agents of the R & D & I ecosystem and thus contribute to the transformation of our production model. " Ion Arocena, CEO of AseBio.

The appeal led by SOMMa, ASEICA and AseBio centres around three groups of measures, the first of which focuses on the strengthening of basic and translational frontier science. The signatories demand a simplification of expense management and associated bureaucracy, an increase and optimization of investment, new talent recruitment programs, and mechanisms that favour the stability of research projects promoted by public organizations.

The second tier of recommendations propose measures that strengthen innovation and promote the transition to a sustainable economy with high added value. It is proposed to promote public-private cooperation and innovative business fabric, as well as the creation of a patronage-fundraising law. It also calls for a need to undertake a profound reform of the aid model for business R&D and a legal framework that minimizes uncertainties and provides stability and security to the R&D system.

Finally, the third tier of recommendations calls for new mechanisms to increase synergies between the academic and business sectors. Key to this will be the development of a long-term national strategy that includes the autonomous communities, increasing the capacity to transfer the knowledge of universities and research institutes into innovative solutions and the creation of new technology-based companies. Finally, the signatories appeal to cultivate the value of science as a reference for citizenship, the business community and political action.

You can find the full document with the list of signatories here (in Spanish).

• Virgo and LIGO have announced the detection of an extraordinarily massive merging binary system: two black holes of 66 and 85 solar masses, which generated a final black hole of around 142 solar masses.
• The remnant black hole is the most massive ever detected with gravitational waves. It lies in a range of mass (from 100 to 1000 solar masses) within which a black hole has ever before been observed, either via gravitational waves or electromagnetic observations and may help to explain the formation of supermassive black holes.
• Moreover, the most massive component of the binary system lies in a mass range forbidden by stellar evolution theory and challenges our understanding of the final stages of massive stars life.

The scientists of the international collaborations running the Advanced Virgo detector at the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) in Italy and the two Advanced LIGOs, in the US, have announced the detection of a black hole of around 142 solar masses, which is the final result of the merger of two black holes of 66 and 85 solar masses. Both the primary components and the remnant lie in a range of mass never observed before, either via gravitational waves or with electromagnetic observations. The final black hole is the most massive ever detected with gravitational waves. The gravitational-wave event was detected by the three interferometers of the global network on the 21st of May, 2019. The signal (named GW190521) has been analysed by scientists. Two scientific papers reporting the discovery and its astrophysical implications have been published today on Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters respectively.

“The signal observed on May 21 of the past year is a very complex one and, since the detected system is so massive, we only observed it for a short time: about 0.1 s”, says Nelson Christensen, directeur de recherche CNRS at ARTEMIS in Nice, France and member of the Virgo Collaboration. “This doesn’t look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect: it is more like something that goes ‘bang’ and the system that generated it is the most massive that LIGO and Virgo have detected until now.” Indeed, the analysis of the signal, based on a powerful suite of state-of-the-art computational and modelling tools, revealed a large amount of information about the different stages of this unique merger.

The breaking of the mass record of the Virgo and LIGO observational runs is just one of the several special features that make the detection of this exceptional merger an unprecedented discovery. A crucial aspect, which particularly drew the attention of astrophysicists, is that the remnant belongs to the class of so-called ‘intermediate-mass black holes’ (from a hundred up to a hundred thousand solar masses). The interest in this black-hole population is linked to one of the most fascinating and challenging puzzles for astrophysicists and cosmologists: the origin of supermassive black holes. These giant monsters, millions to billions of times heavier than the sun and often at the centre of galaxies, may arise from the merger of ‘smaller’ intermediate-mass black holes.

Until today, very few intermediate-mass black hole candidates have been identified through electromagnetic observations alone and the remnant of GW190521 is the first observation of an intermediate-mass black hole via gravitational waves. It is of even greater interest, owing to it being in the range from 100 to 1,000 solar masses, which has represented for many years a sort of "blackhole desert", because of the paucity of candidate events within this range.

The components and the dynamics of the merging binary system of GW190521 offer also other extraordinary astrophysical insights. In particular, the most massive component challenges the models describing the collapse of the heaviest stars, at the end of their lives, into black holes. According to these models, the very massive stars are completely disrupted by the supernova explosion, due to a process called pair instability, and leave behind only gas and cosmic dust. Therefore, astrophysicists would not expect to observe any black hole in the mass range between about 60 and 120 solar masses: exactly the range of mass in which the most massive component of GW190521 lies. Hence, this detection opens new perspectives on the study of massive stars and supernova mechanisms.

“Several scenarios predict the formation of black holes in the so-called pair-instability mass gap: they might result from the merger of smaller black holes or from the collision of massive stars or even from more exotic processes”, says Michela Mapelli, professor at Padova University, member of INFN Padova and of the Virgo Collaboration. “However, it is also possible that we have to revise our present understanding of the final stages of the star's life and the resulting mass constraints on black-hole formation. Either way, GW190521 is a major contribution to the study of the formation
of black holes.”

In fact, the Virgo and LIGO GW190521 detection highlights the existence of black-hole populations that have never been observed before or are unexpected and, in so doing, raises intriguing new questions about their formation mechanisms. Despite the unusually short duration of the signal, which limits our ability to infer the astrophysical properties of the source, the most advanced analyses and models currently available suggest that the initial black holes had strong spins, that is to say, they were rotating rapidly.

“The signal shows hints of precession, a rotation of the orbital plane produced by spins with large magnitude and particular orientation”, states Tito Dal Canton, CNRS researcher at IJCLab in Orsay, France, and member of the Virgo Collaboration. “The effect is weak and we cannot claim it is definitely present, but if true, it would support the hypothesis that the progenitor black holes arose and lived in a very shaky and crowded cosmic environment, like a dense star cluster or the accretion disk of an active galactic nucleus.”

Several different scenarios are still compatible with the shown results and even the hypothesis that the progenitors of the merger might be primordial black holes has not been discarded by scientists. We actually estimate that this merger occurred about 7 billion years ago, a time close to the ancient
ages of the Universe. With respect to previous gravitational-wave detections, the observed GW190521 signal is very short in time and more difficult to analyse. Due to the more complex nature of this signal other more exotic sources have been considered, and these possibilities are described in an accompanying publication. However, these possibilities are disfavoured with respect to the source being a binary black hole merger.

“The observations made by Virgo and LIGO are shedding light on the dark universe and defining a new cosmic landscape”, states Giovanni Losurdo, Virgo spokesperson and head of research at Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy “And today, once again, we announce an unprecedented discovery. We keep improving our detectors to enhance their performance and look further and further into the Universe.”

Additional information

The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 580 members from 109 institutes in 13 different countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Monaco and Japan. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy and is funded by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and Nikhef in the Netherlands. A list of the VirgoCollaboration groups can be found at http://public.virgo-gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration/. More information is available on the Virgo website at http://www.virgo-gw.eu.

LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF, with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Approximately 1,300 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available athttps://my.ligo.org/census.php

Read the articles

Properties and Astrophysical Implications of the 150 M Binary Black Hole Merger GW190521

- The international study counts on the participation of researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, the Institute of High Energy Physics and the Autonomous University of Madrid

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) publishes a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the Universe ever created, which fills the most significant voids of our exploration on the history of cosmos.

Our knowledge on the Universe includes both the ancient and recent history of its expansion, but there were voids corresponding to 11,000 million years between both periods. For five years, scientists from SDSS have worked to discover what happened during that period of time, and used the information to get one of the most important advances in the cosmology of the last decade.

The new results come from one of programmes in SDSS, the international collaboration Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), in which more than a hundred astrophysicists take part. Three Spanish researchers played an important role in the analysis that was presented today: Héctor Gil Marín, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB); Andreu Font Ribera, from the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), and Santiago Ávila, from the Autonomous University of Madrid. The new results feature the detailed
measurements of more than two million galaxies and quasars, which cover 11,000 million years of cosmic time.

Thanks to the study of the radiation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and the measures of the quantity relate to the elements that were created after the Big Bang, we know how the Universe was like at the beginning. We also know the history of the expansion of the Universe over billions of years, thanks to the maps of galaxies and measurements of the distances between them, including those in
phases prior to SDSS.

“The eBoss analysis and the previous experiments in SDSS show the history of the expansion of the Universe over the largest amount of time studied so far”, notes Héctor Gil Marín, from ICCUB. The researcher has led the analysis of these galaxy maps, measuring the expansion rhythm and the growth of structures of the Universe from 6,000 million years ago. These measurements help merging the early and late physics, which generates a complete image of the expansion of the Universe over time.

The obtained map shows filaments and voids that define the structure of the Universe from the moment it was only 300,000 years old. With this map, researchers look for patterns in the distribution of galaxies, which provide information on these key parameters of the Universe, which eBOSS could measure with a precision over 1%.

The map is the result of more than twenty years of efforts to map the Universe through the telescope from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The cosmic history it reveals shows that the expansion of the Universe started accelerating about 6,000 million years ago, and it has increased since then. This accelerated expansion may be so due to a mysterious compound in the Universe, called dark matter, which is consistent with Einstein’s general relativity theory, but difficult to conciliate with our current knowledge of particle physics.

When combining the observations from eBOSS with studies on the early Universe, researchers obtained an image with some incompatibilities. The measurement of the current rate of expansion of the Universe (Hubble’s constant) is about 10% less compared to the value found when measuring the rate of expansion using the distance to near galaxies.

“The high precision of the data makes it unlikely for this mismatch to result from chance”, notes Andreu Font Ribera, IFAE researcher in Barcelona, who led the interpretation of results. “The great variety of data in eBOSS leads to the same conclusion in several ways”, he adds.

There is not a widely accepted explanation for this discrepancy in the measures of expansion rates, but an interesting possibility is that a previously unknown way of matter or energy of the early Universe would have left a mark in the expansion we observe now.

These results have seen the light today with the publication of more than twenty science articles in ArXiv, documents that describe, over more than five hundred pages, the analysis of the latest data in eBOSS. With this summit, the key objectives of the study are reached.

The different groups in the eBoss team, located in universities worldwide, have focused on different aspects of the analysis. Researchers have analysed red and massive galaxies to obtain the part of the map dating from 6,000 million years ago. For further galaxies, they used younger blue galaxies. Last, they used quasars –lightning galaxies that lighten as a consequence of the absorbed matter through a supermassive blackhole in its nucleus– to obtain the map of the Universe from 11,000 million years ago and previous periods of time. To reveal the patterns of the Universe, they conducted an analysis of every measurement, in order to rule out potential pollutants.

“We measured the statistical properties of these maps of galaxies and deduced the rate at which the Universe expands over time”, says Santiago Ávila, from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), who carried out new methods to simulate computer galaxy maps like the ones in this study. Ávila adds that “in combination with additional data from the microwave cosmic background and observations of
supernovas, we estimated the geometrical curve of the Universe is in fact, plain, and we measured the rate of local expansion with a precision over 1%”.

Following the path of SDSS, researchers are already working on the next generation of telescopes to reveal eBOSS. It will begin at the end of the year with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which will observe ten times more galaxies and quasars than eBOSS thanks to a new instrument in the Kitt Peak National Observatory (Arizona, United States). At the same time, the European Space Agency plans the launch of the Euclid satellite by 2022. This is the satellite with a unique telescope to provide a complementary view of the Universe. These
instruments, which count on participation from Spain, will provide data with a precision that has never been seen so far, which enables us to solve the enigma of the dark matter and discordance between the rate of expansion of the local and early Universe. Or, perhaps, they will reveal more surprises.

About the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Participating Institutions. SDSS acknowledges support and resources from the Center for High-Performance Computing at the University of Utah. The SDSS web site is www.sdss.org.

SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS Collaboration including the Brazilian Participation Group, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Mellon University, the Chilean Participation Group, the French Participation Group, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, The Johns Hopkins University, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) / University of Tokyo, the Korean Participation Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Leibniz Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA Heidelberg), Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik (MPA Garching), Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), National Astronomical Observatories of China, New Mexico State University, New York University, University of Notre Dame, Observatório Nacional / MCTI, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, United Kingdom Participation Group, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Oxford, University of Portsmouth, University of Utah, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.

Links to the results

• Description of the project:
  https://www.sdss.org/surveys/eboss/
• Summary of SDSS/eBOSS data: https://www.sdss.org/science/final-bao-and-rsd-measurements/

• Summary of the cosmology interpretation:
  https://www.sdss.org/science/cosmology-results-from-eboss/

CONTACT:

Héctor Gil Marín

hectorgil@icc.ub.edu

675 43 63 06

Junior Leader La Caixa Fellow

Institute of Cosmos Sciences, University of Barcelona

• The detection of a Gamma ray burst by MAGIC telescopes allows us to study whether the speed of light in vacuum is a constant in nature.

• The results, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, show that photons of different energies emitted about 4.5 billion years ago reach Earth with a time difference of less than a minute, thus putting a limit on the hypothesis that the speed of photons depend on their energy.

• Researchers from the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas ( CIEMAT), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), are participating in the research.

In 2019, the MAGIC telescopes detected the first Gamma Ray Burst at very high energies [1, 2]. This was the most intense gamma-radiation ever obtained from such a cosmic object. But the GRB data have more to offer: with further analyses, the MAGIC scientists could now confirm that the speed of light is constant in vacuum – and not dependent on energy. So, like many other tests, GRB data also corroborate Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. The study has now been published in Physical Review Letters.

Einstein's general relativity (GR) is a beautiful theory which explains how mass and energy interact with space-time, creating a phenomenon commonly known as gravity. GR has been tested and retested in various physical situations and over many different scales, and, postulating that the speed of light is constant, it always turned out to outstandingly predict the experimental results. Nevertheless, physicists suspect that GR is not the most fundamental theory, and that there might exist an underlying quantum mechanical description of gravity, referred to as quantum gravity (QG). Some QG theories consider that the speed of light might be energy dependent. This hypothetical phenomenon is called Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). Its effects are thought to be too tiny to be measured, unless they are accumulated over a very long time. So how to achieve that? One solution is using signals from astronomical sources of gamma rays.

Gamma Ray Bursts, the most violent explosions in the universe

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are powerful and far away cosmic explosions, which emit highly variable, extremely energetic signals. They are thus excellent laboratories for experimental tests of QG. The higher energy photons are expected to be more influenced by the QG effects, and there should be plenty of those; these travel billions of years before reaching Earth, which enhances the effect.

GRBs are detected on a daily basis with satellite borne detectors, which observe large portions of the sky, which allows them to detect and locate GRBs almost instantaneously when they occur, and send alerts to telescopes around the world, including MAGIC telescopes, to participate in their observation and study. On January 14, 2019, after receiving an alert from the GRBs detector on the Swift satellite, the MAGIC telescope system detected the first GRB in the domain of teraelectronvolt energies (TeV, 1000 billion times more energetic than the visible light), hence recording by far the most energetic photons ever observed from such an object. Multiple analyses were performed to study the nature of this object and the very high energy radiation.

Marc Ribó, Tenure track lecturer from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB) and Deputy Coordinator of Physics of the MAGIC Collaboration, tells us: "One of the most positive aspects revealed by the detailed study of the GRB190114 is that it is a more or less common GRB. This is good news because it means that we will probably detect more. Our detection opens a new phase in the search for LIV effects on cosmic gamma-ray sources observations.”

Naturally, the MAGIC scientists wanted to use this unique observation to hunt for effects of QG. At the very beginning, they however faced an obstacle: the signal that was recorded with the MAGIC telescopes decayed monotonically with time. While this was an interesting finding for astrophysicists studying how GRBs are produced, it was not favorable for LIV testing. Daniel Kerszberg, a researcher at IFAE in Barcelona said: “when comparing the arrival times of two gamma-rays of different energies, one assumes they were emitted instantaneously from the source. However, our knowledge of processes in astronomical objects is still not precise enough to pinpoint the emission time of any given photon”. Traditionally the astrophysicists rely on recognizable variations of the signal for constraining the emission time of photons. A monotonically changing signal lacks those features. So, the researchers used a theoretical model, which describes the expected gamma-ray emission before the MAGIC telescopes started observing. The model includes a fast rise of the flux, the peak emission and a monotonic decay like that observed by MAGIC. This provided the scientists with a handle to actually hunt for LIV.

Testing the quantum nature of space-time

A careful analysis then revealed no energy-dependent time delay in arrival times of gamma rays. Einstein still seems to hold the line. “This however does not mean that the MAGIC team was left empty handed”, said Giacomo D’Amico, a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich; “we were able to set strong constraints on the QG energy scale”. The limits set in this study are comparable to the best available limits obtained using GRB observations with satellite detectors or using ground-based observations of active galactic nuclei.

The limits on quantum gravity that have been obtained in this work are compatible with those already existing to date, and are the first to be obtained by observing the most energy GRB emission that can occur. With this pioneering study, the MAGIC team has established a starting point for future research in the search for measurable effects of the quantum nature of space-time.

In contrast to previous works, this was the first such test ever performed on a GRB signal at TeV energies. With this seminal study, the MAGIC team thus set a foothold for future research and even more stringent tests of Einstein’s theory in the 21st century. Oscar Blanch, spokesperson of the MAGIC collaboration, concluded: "This time, we observed a relatively nearby GRB. We hope to soon catch brighter and more distant events, which would enable even more sensitive tests."

MAGIC and the MAGIC collaboration

MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) is a system of two 17 meter diameter telescopes located at 2200 meters above sea level at the Observatorio El Roque de los Muchachos (ORM), in the Canary island of La Palma, Spain. The pioneering telescopes are designed to detect very high energy gamma-rays in the energy range from 30 GeV to more than 50 TeV, using the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov technique. The MAGIC telescopes are run by an international collaboration of around 280 people from 12 countries, including scientists, engineers, technicians and other staff.

The Spanish community has been involved in MAGIC since its inception. The members of MAGIC are currently Researchers from the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas ( CIEMAT), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). The Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) participates in this project through researchers from the ICCUB and CERES-UAB units. In addition, the MAGIC data center is the Port d'Informació Científica (PIC), a collaboration of the IFAE and the CIEMAT.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1750-x

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1754-6