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An international group of astronomers has observationally demonstrated the profound effect that a star evolving through the planetary nebula phase can have on planetary bodies in orbit around it.
An international team of researchers, including staff from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a planetary nebula that destroyed its own planetary system, conserving the remaining fragments in the form of dust orbiting its central star.
Using the set of first-light observations from the new William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) wide-field spectrograph, a team of more than 50 astronomers, led by Dr Marina Arnaudova at the University of Hertfordshire, has presented the first WEAVE scientific results on Stephans Quintet.
The Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS) collaboration, led by the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), has announced the release of the PAUS survey data, a groundbreaking catalogue of cosmic distances derived from data obtained using the PAUcam camera on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). This release will help astronomers to better understand how cosmic structures form, particularly under the influence of dark matter and dark energy.
The passage of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov in December 2019 offered a unique opportunity to acquire comprehensive data on an object originating from another planetary system, that left behind material in interplanetary space as it approached the Sun. Astronomers using a number of telescopes around the world, including the telescopes of the Isaac Newton Group (ING), monitored its behaviour spectroscopically and photometrically.
Call for Proposals to the CCIs International Time Programme on the Canary Islands. More information: https://www.iac.es/system/files/documents/2023-12/CCI_ITP2024-2025_Call%20For%20Proposals_0.pdf
Astronomers have discovered an extremely large and faint stream of stars in the Coma galaxy cluster. This is the largest stellar stream detected to date and the first of its kind found in a galaxy cluster. This discovery, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, has been possible thanks to observations made using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT).
To their surprise, an international team of researchers has discovered a giant and extremely faint stream of stars between galaxies. Streams were already known in our own galaxy and in nearby galaxies, but this is the first time that a stream runs between galaxies. It is the largest stream detected to date. The astronomers publish their findings in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
An international team of scientists, with participation by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a very large, but thin, stream of stars in the Coma cluster of galaxies. This is the largest stream of stars detected until now, and the first to be found in a cluster of galaxies. This finding, which is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was made using observations taken with the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafia, La Palma, Canary Islands).
Yesterday, 30 October 2023, from the telescope itself at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, the WEAVE instrument, a powerful state-of-the-art multi-fibre spectrograph, was publicly unveiled.
The WEAVE spectrograph, a powerful, next-generation multi-fibre spectrograph installed on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (La Palma, Canary Islands), was inaugurated on October 30th, 2023.
Asteroid 2023 DZ2, discovered using the Isaac Newton Telescope, will not collide with Earth, even though their orbits intersect. The results of a detailed analysis reveal the orbit of 2023 DZ2 is synchronised with that of Jupiter, reducing the probability of a collision in the coming decades.
Astronomers using data from the extended Planetary Nebula Spectrograph (ePN.S) early-type galaxy survey find that galaxies that are efficient in forming stars, like discs, are also efficient in retaining angular momentum. In early-type galaxies (ETGs), it is not so: there is a strong dependence as a function of total stellar mass, with the most massive galaxies being least efficient in forming stars and in retaining the angular momentum.
A study led by James Munday (PhD student at the University of Warwick and support astronomer in the ING Studentship Programme 2022/2023) has recently been published that exploits optical photometry of HM Cancri, spanning more than 20 years. This long time-baseline has led to the determination of an incredibly precise orbital decay constraint for the system by timing the phasing of an optical modulation, which would not have been possible without the Isaac Newton Telescope, and the William Herschel Telescope.
An inauguration event. WEAVE - A New Generation Multi-Object Spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope. 30 October 2023, Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. Bringing together the WEAVE community to celebrate the start of the scientific exploitation of WEAVE.
Un equipo cientifico internacional, en el que participan las investigadoras del Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) Cristina Ramos Almeida, Patricia Bessiere y Giovanna Speranza, ha descubierto que los cuasares, uno de los objetos mas brillantes y energeticos del Universo, se encienden principalmente por fusiones entre galaxias.
An experiment was designed to demonstrate the tomographic scintillation correction technique using the Isaac Newton Telescope. The proof of concept experiment used a single wavefront sensor and a SCIDAR turbulence profiler. A reflecting prism was used to alternate between the SCIDAR measurements and WFS data measurements.
We welcome applications for five places on the ING studentship programme 2023/24. The deadline for applications is Wednesday 15th March 2023, 24:00 WET. Details of the programme can be found on: https://www.ing.iac.es/astronomy/science/studentship.html
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is midnight, 28th February 2023.
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the WEAVE instrument team present the first observations with this new instrument. This is a powerful latest generation multi-fibre spectrograph which, in synergy with the Gaia satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), will be used to obtain spectra of several million stars in the disc and the halo of our Galaxy, permitting in-depth archaeology of the Milky Way. In addition, other galaxies, both nearby and distant, will be studied, some of them detected by the LOFAR radio telescope, in order to get to know their evolution.
WEAVE, a robotic sky scanner in La Palma, has looked 280 million light years away to reveal the spectra of a pair of galaxies. PI Gavin Dalton from the University of Oxford and STFCs RAL Space explains more about this instrument and how it came to be. Find out more here: https://www.ukri.org/news/uk-led-robotic-sky-scanner-reveals-its-first-galactic-fingerprint/
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the WEAVE instrument team present first-light observations with the WEAVE spectrograph. WEAVE is a powerful, next-generation multi-fibre spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (La Palma, Canary Islands), now being commissioned on-sky and already generating high-quality data.
While analysing data from the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS, a radio survey at 150 MHz), a team of astronomers discovered a ring of diffuse emission around the Calvera pulsar. The ring is large, at approximately one degree, and sits in a region otherwise empty of large-scale radio emission.
Tom has been a pre-eminent contributor to the ongoing research taking place at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING). He was a prolific user of the William Herschel and Isaac Newton telescopes, starting with IDS, and then, of course, with ISIS. His primary research field was compact binary objects, but since he had such broad interests and expertise across astronomy, his work covered nearly all areas of research conducted at the ING.
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes wishes to congratulate Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna, Austria) who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 for his empirical work carried out at the Roque de Los Muchachos and Teide Observatories since 2006 aimed at experimenting with entangled photons over large distances and thus establishing the pioneering work for secure quantum encrypted communication.
After a few initial problems, the image quality in the focal plane is now excellent, the spectrograph is well-focused and the other subsystems are working well enough to begin commissioning the LIFU mode of observations. That commissioning begins this week, and will be followed by science verification of the LIFU mode, and then, once the other sub-systems are ready, commissioning of the mIFU and MOS modes.
A team of international astronomers, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, has discovered a surprising high lithium abundance in the atmosphere of the companion star of the millisecond binary pulsar PSR J1023+0038.
A team of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), the University of Manchester and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have detected an anomalously high lithium abundance in the atmosphere of the companion star of a binary millisecond pulsar. The lithium abundance is higher compared to stars with the same effective temperature and high-metallicity stars and so the study provides unambiguous evidence for fresh lithium production.
Since 2008, undergraduate students from Leiden University have been visiting the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) as part of their astronomy bachelors degree programme. This programme gives students the opportunity to gain valuable experience in the field of observational astronomy. Through this programme they learn how to write a proposal, plan and execute their observations, and acquire the skills to analyse and present their findings.
Using the HiPERCAM imager on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), astronomers have been able to observe in exquisite detail the eclipse of the central star of the planetary nebula Outters 5 by its binary companion.
Astronomers from Spain and Romania have scrutinised two distant trans-Neptunian object candidates, identified by automated software analyses of data from NASAs TESS mission. They used PF-QHY, a CMOS camera mounted at the renewed prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope, and could not recover these objects.
Astronomers from The Netherlands, UK and Germany have developed a new method to find distant quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which better distinguishes them from other objects that look like them. Using machine learning techniques and spectroscopic data taken with the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), the researchers discovered possibly the highest-redshift quasar ever observed with the INT.
Applications for the 2022/23 studentship programme are welcome until 25th March 2022. This programme offers five ING studentship positions (Sep 2022 - Sep 2023).
With the progressive relaxation of Covid-related travel restrictions, and the end of the volcanic eruption on La Palma in December 2021, ING is happy to announce that, starting 1 February 2022, we have resumed normal visitor-mode operations at the INT.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is midnight, 28th February 2022.
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A first-of-its-kind exploding star - thought to have existed only in theory - originating from a Wolf-Rayet star was recently discovered by an international team of collaborators led by Avishay Gal-Yam from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Observations were made with several telescopes around the world, including the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and through the Isaac Newton Group (ING) Override Programme of targets of opportunity, using the Auxiliary-port CAMera (ACAM) imager and spectrograph.
Using the PFIP imager on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), astronomers have been able to trace for the first time the complete tidal stream surrounding the Sombrero galaxy, a galaxy which exhibits a rare morphology not yet fully explained.
Using observations and archival data from several telescopes around the world and in orbit, including the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), astronomers have discovered at least 70 new free-floating planets (FFPs) - planets that wander through space without a parent star to orbit - in the Upper Scorpius OB stellar association, which is the nearest region of star formation to our Sun. This is the largest sample of such planets found in a single group and it nearly doubles the number known over the entire sky.
At least one out of four white dwarfs (WDs) will end its life as a magnetic star, and therefore magnetic fields are an essential component of WD physics. New insights into the magnetism of degenerate stars from a recent analysis of a volume-limited sample of WDs have provided the best evidence obtained so far of how the frequency of magnetism in WDs correlates with age. This could help to explain the origin and evolution of magnetic fields in WDs.
The volcanic eruption starting Sunday 19 September on La Palma has been widely covered in the media. ING wishes to reassure our user community that the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory has so far been unaffected by the volcanic activity or the tremors that preceded it. The access road is likewise unaffected and activity at the Observatory continues as usual.
A major telescope upgrade, which will allow a comprehensive census of the universe to answer fundamental astrophysical questions, is now close to completion.
WEAVE, een ingenieuze spectrometer met duizenden verplaatsbare glasvezels, is bijna klaar voor gebruik door sterrenkundigen. Dat meldt een team van astronomen en technici onder leiding van Scott Trager (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen). De spectrometer, inclusief de twee robots die de glasvezels in wisselende opstellingen leggen, is succesvol geinstalleerd op de Nederlands-Britse-Spaanse William Herschel Telescope op La Palma.
All the main components of the William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) - the positioner, fibres, spectrograph and detectors - have now arrived on La Palma and are being integrated with the telescope. After that, WEAVE will begin its on-sky commissioning phase.
On Thursday, June 24, a Spanish Television (TVE) team travelled to the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) to film part of the first episode of the series La Ultima Frontera, which is dedicated to science dissemination and has Javier Santaolalla, who discovered his vocation for science during a visit to the WHT in 1992, as its main presenter.
An international team of astronomers led by Ignacio Negueruela (Universidad de Alicante, Spain) has discovered one of the most massive star clusters in the solar neighbourhood, signposted by dozens of stars sufficiently bright to be seen with a small backyard telescope.
An international team of astrophysicists led by the Stellar Astrophysics Group of the University of Alicante (UA), the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), and the University of Valparaiso (Chile) has discovered a massive cluster of stars of intermediate age in the direction of the Scutum constellation. This object, which has been named Valparaiso 1, lies some seven thousand light years away from the Sun, and contains at least fifteen thousand stars.
Following the Announcement of Opportunity ING issued on 21 March 2021, for WHT service-mode prime-focus imaging observations during April and May, we now extend this opportunity, and invite further applications for observations.
During the integration of WEAVE at the WHT, an opportunity has arisen to offer service-mode imaging with a camera (the QHY) mounted behind the new WEAVE prime-focus corrector, during April and May 2021.
On 14 March 2021 Her Majesty Ambassador to Spain, Mr Hugh Elliott and his wife Mrs Toni Elliott, visited the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (ORM). They toured the Isaac Newton (INT) and the William Herschel Telescopes (WHT), and the Gran Telescopio Canarias, and heard about the latest instrumental developments and the international partnerships underpinning them. They also saw the domes of some of the UKs university-led telescopes at the ORM, including the Liverpool telescope, and SuperWASP and GOTO from Warwick University.
We welcome applications for six places on the ING studentship programme 2021/22. The deadline for applications is Wednesday 31st March 2021, 24:00 WET. The programme provides a unique opportunity for up to four PhD, MSc or undergraduate astronomy students to get hands-on experience of work at an international observatory. Successful applicants will spend one year on La Palma, supporting imaging and spectroscopy runs at the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and working on projects supervised by the ING staff. The studentship programme is open to anyone, but we particularly welcome applicants from our three partner countries: the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
On the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the fourth edition of Chat with an Astronomer, organised by the Woman and Astronomy Commission of the Spanish Astronomical Society, will take place from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm (Universal Time) on February 18. Cecilia Farina (Isaac Newton Telescope Group of Telescopes) will be one of the 75 astrophysicists who will be available to chat about her research, her experience as woman scientists, her research career or astronomy in general.
This image of an unusually-close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was obtained on 21 Dec 2020, during tests of the new optical corrector at the prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). The image is a composite of exposures taken with a CMOS camera, through blue, green and red filters.
An international collaboration, including astronomers from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, using the Planetary Nebulae Spectrograph (PN.S) mounted on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) has found that stars and gas dominate gravity in the inner parts of the disc galaxy NGC 6946, while dark matter dominates in its outer parts.
ING is expanding its studentship programme and is advertising two extra places for the 2020/2021 call, to cover the period from now until the end of September 2021. This will be an exciting year for the ING students. Opportunities for INT observations are being expanded as the INT is increasingly operated in service mode, in response to travel restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition, the students will be able to take part in
the commissioning of the WEAVE instrument on the WHT, planned to begin in January 2021.
Astronomers using Suprime-Cam on the Subaru Telescope and the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph (PN.S) on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) have been able to unveil the presence of an old and metal-poor halo in the outskirts of a giant elliptical galaxy in a loose group. This is the first study to clearly establish the link between a metal poor population of stars and the excess of planetary nebulae (PNe) in the outer regions of an elliptical galaxy.
Using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), a team led by University of Warwick astronomers has concluded that geosynchronous orbital debris posing a threat to operational satellites is not being monitored closely enough. In a new published survey they report that more than 75% of the geosynchronous orbital debris they detected could not be matched to known objects in public satellite catalogues.
On June 23, the new 6-lens, two-degree prime-focus corrector (PFC) arrived at the WHT. On September 11, ING celebrated WEAVE PFC first light, after images of Vega were obtained with the acquisition camera. On August 31, the WEAVE spectrograph arrived at the WHT and was installed in the GHRIL Nasmyth enclosure. Looking to the future, the fibre positioner with its full-fibre complement will soon complete tests in Oxford, for transport to La Palma in October. Delivery of WEAVE hardware to La Palma will be completed with the arrival of the detectors soon thereafter.
With the end of the Covid-19 state of emergency in Spain, the Isaac Newton Group (ING) has resumed operation and development activities. Giving highest priority to the safety and well-being of staff, which can be effectively protected in the relative isolation of the observatory, we ask all prospective visiting astronomers and external contractors planning a visit to ING facilities to follow these guidelines.
On the afternoon of Friday August 21 a forest fire started in Garafia in the north of La Palma, at an elevation of approximately 700 meters above sea level, some 6 km north of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM). Thanks to the effective response, the fire was declared under control by the evening of Monday 24th, and science observations at ORM were resumed on the night of August 25.
The Isaac Newton Telescope Galactic Plane Survey (IGAPS) is the merger of two photometric surveys in the optical wavelenght range, IPHAS and UVEX, both based on data obtained in ~1860 square degrees covering the northern Galatic plane using the Wide Field Camera (WFC) from 2003 to 2018. The IGAPS point-source catalogue contains 295 million objects, and it provides measures of 174 parameters.
With great sadness, we report that Rebeca Galera, support astronomer at the Isaac Newton Group (ING), died on June 11 on La Palma after a sudden illness. She had been admitted to the main Hospital of La Palma a few days earlier.
A paper is available describing INGs plans for how surveys and open time share the WHT time in the surveys era.
We regret to inform successful proposers that completion of their programmes in 20A is not planned.
Only in the event of serious setbacks with WEAVE integration we would consider carrying out such 20A scientific programmes, in service mode, during July and possibly August.
In a previous INGNEWS message we informed that all activities at the telescopes, including science observations at the INT and WEAVE integration at the WHT, stopped in 16 March 2020.
A blazar is a particular type of active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a central supermassive black hole which emits a jet, a flux of highly energetic particles and radiation moving almost at the velocity of light, and which is aligned along the observers line-of-sight. An international team of researchers has observed the birth of one of these objects for the first time by combining observations from several telescopes, among them the William Herschel Telescope (WHT).
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) joins the fight against the coronavirus COVID-19 on the island of La Palma with the delivery of masks, full-body overalls and boot covers to the Geriatric Hospital Nuestra Senora de Los Dolores of Santa Cruz de La Palma.
Folllowing the declaration of a state of emergency (Estado de Alarma) by the Spanish Government on Saturday 14th March, ING has stepped up measures to protect its staff and visitors. With immediate effect and until further notice, staff are working from home, with minimal visits to the telescopes (for essential maintenance) and to the sea-level offices. There will be no day-time or night-time activity at the WHT or INT, i.e. no visiting observers and no observing, until further notice. ING staff will travel outside La Palma only when strictly necessary.
The 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) is operated at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain) by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING). The INT is used for astrophysical research by a large community of astronomers worldwide.
A massive white dwarf star with a bizarre carbon-rich atmosphere could be two white dwarfs merged together, and which only narrowly avoided destruction, according to an international team led by University of Warwick (UK) astronomers, who observed the star with the William Herschel Telescope.
During the stand-down last November, the new rotator system was successfully integrated within the WEAVE Prime Focus Assembly, and then mounted on the WHT top-end where an exhaustive campaign of tests took place over several weeks. The main objective was to mechanically align the rotator with the optical axis of the WHT primary mirror.
The study of Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is driven by both scientific and practical reasons. Because of their proximity to our planet, they can provide key information regarding the delivery of water and organic-rich material to the early Earth, and the subsequent emergence of life. On the other hand, these small bodies of the Solar System have non-negligible long-term probabilities of colliding with the Earth, and can be targets of future space exploration.
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) warmly congratulate James Peebles (Princeton University), Michel Mayor (University of Geneva) and Didier Queloz (Universities of Geneva and Cambridge) on the award of the Physics Nobel Prize 2019.
This summer, the WEAVE rotator was delivered by IDOM to the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). At the WHT, the rotator was mounted on a elescope simulator, i.e. a rig allowing it to be positioned at any elevation angle, for a campaign of tests. The main aim of the tests was to verify the functionality and performance of the rotator before integrating it with the rest of WEAVE.
On the 2nd and 3rd of October Prof Mark Thomson, Executive Chairman of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) visited the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING). Shortly after arriving at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, he met the observing teams at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), and used a portable telescope outside the INT to view the Andromeda Galaxy, star clusters, nebulae, planets and the Moon. On the following morning, he learnt about the progress made with WEAVE and addressed the ING staff.
An international team of astronomers have made a historic discovery using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), detecting gas molecules in a comet which has tumbled into our Solar System from another star. It is the first time that astronomers have been able to detect this type of material in an interstellar object.
A science verification (SV) programme will be conducted, comprising small, well-defined SV projects from the WEAVE surveys and from the ING community. With this announcement, the ING and the WEAVE instrument consortium invite the ING community to submit letters of intent for WEAVE SV proposals.
On the 14th of April and the 24th of May, 2019, the winners from the Dutch Science Quiz (Nationale Wetenschapsquiz) visited the WHT as part of their prize.
Members of an association of astronomy based in the North of France: the Courrieres Amateur Astronomers Group (GAAC in French) and the French Association Magnitude 78.
Using the capabilities of the Wide Field Camera (WFC) at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) to explore large areas of the sky and detect faint ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs), a collaboration of astronomers in the Netherlands and Spain performed a study to investigate these galaxies in detail, the Kapteyn IAC WEAVE INT Clusters Survey (KIWICS).
A team of astronomers led by Matthew Hooton at Queens University Belfast (United Kingdom) used the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) to observe the hottest known exoplanet during its secondary eclipse, which is the first published example of any ground-based secondary eclipse observation at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths.
Comet 46P/Wirtanen photographed by Abel de Burgos Sierra on the night of 16th December 2018 at perihelion, from the vicinity of the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). He used a Canon EOS 6D Mark I camera with a Canon 100-400 L IS USM lens, on a SkyWatcher Star Adventurer mount. Comet 46P/Wirtanen is seen here on the right as a blurred, greenish object near the Pleiades. The bright, orange star on the left, between the Hyades and NGC 1647 open clusters, is Aldebaran (alpha Tauri).
Cosmological simulations predict that early-type galaxies (ETGs) are the results of extended mass accretion histories characterised by different numbers of mergers and merger mass ratios, their timing, and gas fractions. Depending on the sequence and nature of the mergers following the first phase of in-situ star formation, these accretion histories may lead to ETGs that have low or high mass halos, and that rotate fast or slow.
Magnetic fields are present in a large variety of stars across the Hertszprung-Russell diagram, during all evolutionary stages from pre-main sequence stars, to main sequence stars and evolved stars, up to the final stages when the star explodes as a supernova. Magnetic fields play important roles in stellar evolution. Even a fairly weak magnetic field can suppress convection in stellar atmospheres and affect cooling times of extremely old white dwarfs. While the effects of the magnetic fields are well observed and sometime even understood, the origin of stellar magnetic fields is often unknown, and we do not know how fields evolve as stars evolve.
A team of scientists led by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna has made a new test of quantum entanglement this time using photons from distant astronomical objects as collected by the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG).
An international team of astronomers led by Marie Karjalainen (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, Spain), used electron-multiplying frame-transfer CCDs mounted on ISIS at the William Herschel Telescope to obtain time resolved spectroscopy of dust and gas from the extrasolar planetesimals orbiting WD 1145+017. The new results confirm previous findings showing the u-band excess and a decrease in line absorption during transits. Both can be explained by an opaque body blocking a fraction of the gas disc causing the absorption, implying that the absorbing gas is between the white dwarf and the transiting objects.
Following the principles of Lucky Imaging, a team of astronomers led by Jesus Maiz Apellaniz (Centro de Astrobiologia, Madrid) obtained Lucky Spectroscopy for five multiple massive-star systems on the nights of 2017 September 7 and 8. The spectra were obtained with the standard GOSSS-survey configuration using ISIS on the William Herschel Telescope, with some modifications (narrower slit and detector window, and tens of shorter exposures) to allow for lucky spatial separation of the individual component spectra. The spectra of delta Ori Aa+Ab and sigma Ori AaAb+B were successfully separated.
Black hole X-ray binaries (BHXBs) are essential to our understanding of extreme physics across the universe, such as accretion/ejection processes, supernova explosions, long gamma-ray bursts and gravitational-wave sources. About 60 BHXBs have been discovered to date in the Galaxy through transient outbursts but, unfortunately, only 17 are confirmed dynamically (i.e. have a mass function greater than ~3 solar masses), owing to difficulties in measuring the spectrum of the companion star at very faint quiescent luminosities.
The large number of detected exoplanets around evolved stars sharply contrasts with the lack of detections of forming planets in protoplanetary disks around young stars, mainly because of the observational difficulties. Earlier this year, an international team of astronomers led by Ignacio Mendigutia (Centro de Astrobiologia, Spain), decided to use the ISIS spectrograph on the WHT to study the nature of the exoplanet LkCa15 b, by means of a technique called spectro-astrometry. This allowed them to derive not only the intensity spectrum around the H-alpha emission, but also the so called photocentre spectrum and the full width half maximum (FWHM) spectrum.
The Pristine Survey allows astronomers to look for and research the oldest stars in our universe, with the goal of learning more about the young universe right after the Big Bang. Recently, the survey team reported on the discovery of a particularly metal-poor star, Pristine 221.8781+9.7844, in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Using data obtained with the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph (PN.S) on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), astronomers pursued an original investigation to constrain the mass of the satellite progenitors of the stars in the halos and determine a proxy for their dynamical age by measuring the motions along the lines of sight of hundreds of stars that are in a particular stage of their evolution: the Planetary Nebulae (PNe). Instead of a uniform stellar population floating in the gravitational potential of the galaxy, astronomers identified three populations, one associated with the smooth halo of M49, a sub-component of bright planetary nebulae associate with the recent accretion of a dwarf galaxy (VCC 1249), and a population of stars associated with the intra-group light.
A team of astronomers from SRON, Radboud University and the University of Cambridge have found out that by tweaking the existing automated system, Gaia can be used to detect hundreds of peculiar transients in the centres of galaxies. They found about 480 transients over a period of about a year. Their new method will be implemented in the system as soon as possible allowing astronomers to determine the nature of these events.
Astronomers analysing simultaneous data obtained using the William Herschel Telescope and the Gran
Telescopio Canarias, have been able to model the observed light curves of a transitional millisecond pulsar and conclude that
the accretion of clumpy material through the magnetic barrier of the neutron star
can produce the observed near-IR/optical variability and correlations.
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 2 September 2018.
Thanks to early completion of a recent pre-WEAVE standdown, a block of 7 bright nights (July 27 - August 2) has become available for service observations with the WHTs ISIS and/or ACAM.
The ING has been working on equipping the Willaim Herschel Telescope (WHT) with new, digital electronics to replace the telescopes original analog electronics.
After deployment and successful commissioning, the WHT resumed routine science observations on Friday, 22nd June, using the new electronic components as well as several updated software packages.
Researchers from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) report the discovery of one of the most massive known neutron stars using the William Herschel (WHT), the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the IAC80 telescopes.
Wonders of the Moon is a BBC documentary which uses the latest, most detailed imagery to reveal the monthly life cycle of the moon. Partially filmed on La Palma and at the William Herschel Telescope site (minutes 5 to 9 approximately), the programme finds out how the moon shapes life on Earth, explores its mysterious dark side, and discovers how the moons journey around Earth delivers one of natures most awe-inspiring events - a total solar eclipse.
Wonders of the Moon is a BBC documentary which uses the latest, most detailed imagery to reveal the monthly life cycle of the moon. Partially filmed on La Palma and at the William Herschel Telescope site (minutes 5 to 9 approximately), the programme finds out how the moon shapes life on Earth, explores its mysterious dark side, and discovers how the moons journey around Earth delivers one of natures most awe-inspiring events - a total solar eclipse.
Astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope find that there may be a cosmic lack of a chemical element essential to life, phosphorus, from observations of the Crab Nebula where they unexpectedly find very little. If this element is lacking in other parts of the cosmos, then it could be difficult for extra-terrestrial life to exist.
A team of astronomers led by Dr David Sobral of Lancaster University, UK made one of the largest 3D maps of the infant universe using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii and the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). Looking back in time to 16 different epochs between 11 and 13 billion years ago, the researchers discovered almost 4,000 early galaxies, many of which will have evolved into galaxies like our own Milky Way.
On 14 March Prof Harry van der Laan visited the ORM. Prof van der Laan was ESOs Director General in the eighties when the VLTs were conceived and designed. Earlier, he had been a key architect of the UK-NL partnership that led to the establishment of the Isaac Newton Group on La Palma. Van der Laan welcomed the plans for continued front-line instrumentation for the WHT.
We welcome applications for four places on the ING studentship programme 2019/20. The deadline for applications is 31st March 2019. The programme provides a unique opportunity for up to four PhD, MSc or undergraduate astronomy students to get hands-on experience of work at an international observatory. Successful applicants will spend one year on La Palma, supporting imaging and spectroscopy runs at the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and working on projects supervised by the ING staff. The studentship programme is open to anyone, but we particularly welcome applicants from our three partner countries:
the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
We welcome applications for four places on the ING studentship programme 2018/19. The deadline for applications is 31st March 2018.
The programme provides a unique opportunity for up to four PhD, MSc
or undergraduate astronomy students to get hands-on experience of work
at an international observatory. Successful applicants will spend one
year on La Palma, supporting imaging and spectroscopy runs at the
2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and working on projects supervised
by the ING staff. The studentship programme is open to anyone, but
we particularly welcome applicants from our three partner countries:
the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 28 February 2018.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications forInternational Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 28th February, 2018.More information: http://www.otri.iac.es/cci
HS2231+2441, an HW Vir type, is a binary system composed of a low-mass white dwarf, with only 0.2-0.3 of a solar mass, with an effective temperature of 28,500 K, and a brown dwarf with 36-46 Jupiter masses. The binary system has an orbital period of approximately 3 hours. HS2231+2441 is the least massive HW Vir system known.
The ING celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first light ceremony of the INT. A special momentum took place on the night of the 1st of December, 2017.
A/2017 U1 is the first known small body from interstellar space. It is visible in the centre of this 5-minute exposure using the ACAM imager on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on October 28, 2017. At the time of the observations, the WHT was able to lock on A/2017 U1 while it was travelling at a speed of 26 kilometres per second (the background, much more distant stars appear streaked because the telescope was tracking the motion of A/2017 U1).
HiPERCAM was successfully commissioned on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on 17 October 2017 by a team from the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick and the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh. HiPERCAM was designed as a next generation version of ULTRACAM.
Nothing can emerge from a black hole. Yet, in nature, we find ultra-powerful jets of energy that shoot out from the immediate vicinities of growing black holes.
How these jets form remains a puzzle. In a new study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers announce that they have new clues to this mystery.
Buenos dias Canarias (Canarian Television) reports on the 50th anniversary of the Isaac Newton Telescopes inauguration (1967). Broadcast on the 4th of October, 2017.
Using observations across the entire electro-magnetic spectrum, astronomers have discovered a radio pulsar spinning 707 times every second, making it the fastest known spinning pulsar in the Galactic field and the second fastest known overall.
A team of researchers led from the University of Warwick, UK is undertaking a transmission spectroscopy survey of hot Jupiters using the ACAM imager and spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope. By observing spectroscopically an exoplanets transit across the face of its host star the team is able to detect changes in opacity in the exoplanets atmosphere as a function of wavelength. These early results have demonstrated the capabilities of ACAM to detect atmospheric opacity sources such as Rayleigh scattering, and to distinguish between clear and cloudy atmospheres with errors in the transmission spectrum of around 1 atmospheric scale height, comparable to Hubble Space Telescope.
With the naked eye, we can see some 3000 stars in a dark night. However, if Earth would reside within an ultra-diffuse galaxy, we would only spot a few dozen stars on the sky. Galaxies of this type were either not able to produce more stars in the first place, or they got stripped of their stars by tidal forces. Intriguingly, though, larger telescopes and improved imaging techniques have recently led to the discovery of many ultra-diffuse galaxies in the harshest environments possible: galaxy clusters.
The total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 was seen as a partial eclipse from the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory at sunset. Shown above is the eclipsed Sun over the dome of the William Herschel Telescope as photographed by Jure Skvarč (ING), with exposure set to F/11.0, ISO 200 and 1/60s. Credit: Jure Skvarč (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes)
Highly obscured and rapidly growing supermassive black holes (SMBH), known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), might represent the key phase when SMBH accreted most of their mass and when the relationship between galaxies and their central SMBHs was established. A new study by an international team of astronomers led by Dr Silvia Mateos from the Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria (CSIC-UC) in Spain, now suggests that many of the brightest SMBH may be escaping our detection as they hide in heavily obscured environments.
The William Herschel Telescope saw first light on the 1st of June, 1987. Coinciding with this ephemeris, we organised a birthday party at the Observatory.
The William Herschel Telescope saw first light on the 1st of June, 1987. Coinciding with this ephemeris, ING staff organised a birthday party at the Observatory. We took some group commemorative photos at the WHT and had a lunch altogether with a special cake.
The William Herschel Telescope saw first light on the 1st of June, 1987. Coinciding with this ephemeris, ING staff organised a birthday party at the Observatory. We took some group commemorative photos at the WHT and had a lunch altogether with a special cake.
Heavens On Earth - La Palma from vikas chander on Vimeo. Time-lapse movie of the WHT, including other views of the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory and La Palma island. Available formats: Vimeo. Credit: Vikas Chander and the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma.
A team of scientists led by members of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), have detected and measured a complete "carpet" of expanding bubbles in the interstellar medium of the "Antennae", a pair of galaxies in interaction which will eventually merge. The work, published in Monthy Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society is based on observations with GHaFaS on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). This instrument is capable of making a map of the velocities of a complete galaxy using the emission from the ionized hydrogen in its interstellar medium.
Planetary nebulae are believed to represent the fate of all Sun-like stars; as the star evolves it sheds its outers layers in the form of a dense stellar wind which is then ionised to form the glowing shell of the planetary nebula. It has become apparent that the wide array of shapes found in planetary nebulae are difficult to understand in a single star scenario.
Based on spectroscopic observations taken with the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in 2015, astronomers from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Sheffield have found the first evidence for a stellar tidal disruption event (TDE) in a galaxy with a massive on-going starburst.
We welcome applications for four places on the ING studentship programme 2017/18. The deadline for applications is 31st March 2017.
The programme provides a unique opportunity for up to four PhD, MSc
or undergraduate astronomy students to get hands-on experience of work
at an international observatory. Successful applicants will spend one
year on La Palma, supporting imaging and spectroscopy runs at the
2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and working on projects supervised
by the ING staff. The studentship programme is open to anyone, but
we particularly welcome applicants from our three partner countries:
the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
The future of the William Herschel and Isaac Newton telescopes on La Palma has been guaranteed through a new operation agreement between the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Instituto de Astro
An international team of astronomers has found a system of seven potentially habitable planets orbiting a star 39 light years away, three of which could have water on their surfaces increasing the possibility they could host life. Using ground and space instruments and telescopes, including the ACAM imager on the William Herschel Telescope, the team identified the planets as they passed in front of the ultracool dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1. The star has around eight per cent of the mass of the Sun and is no bigger than Jupiter.
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 28 February 2017.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for
International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 28th February, 2017.
More information: http://www.otri.iac.es/cci
For the past twenty years observers have been trying to test the effects of the predicted dark matter halos on the bars in barred galaxies.
The basic idea is that according to simulation models which include the halos, these should have acted as a gravitational brake and slowed down
the rotation of the bars during the lifetimes of galaxy discs.
This could be tested by measuring the corotation radius corresponding to the bar, which is the radius at which the angular pattern speed of the bar is
equal to the angular speed of the stars in the disc.
The problem has been the difficulty of measuring the corotation radius. However, a group at the Instituto de Astrof
Stereo-SCIDAR is a high-altitude resolution and high sensitivity optical turbulence profiler. By measuring the intensity pattern of two nearby stars astronomers can triangulate the altitude and strength of optical turbulence in the Earths atmosphere. And by introducing a temporal delay between these two signals, they can also calculate the horizontal velocity of each layer.
Stereo-SCIDAR was developed by Durham University, UK as part of the Canary Adaptive-Optics demonstrator project (CANARY) on the William Herschel Telescope, and it has been operated on the Isaac Newton Telescope for a total of 28 nights.
Astronomers from the Universities of Lancaster in the UK and Leiden in the Netherlands report the discovery of giant halos around early Milky Way type galaxies which are composed of Lyman-alpha photons that have struggled to escape them.
The missing mass problem is a long-standing issue in astrophysics, being present in galaxies, cluster of galaxies and even at the cosmological scale. Astronomers from Taiwan have used archival data from PN.S and SAURON to study the internal dynamics of seven nearby elliptical galaxies, and report finding a dearth of dark matter. They conclude that the dynamics of these galaxies are well explained by MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 25 September 2016.
The latest upgrade to CANARY was commissioned between the 19th and 25th July, 2016 with the installation of the European Southern Observatorys Wendelstein sodium Laser Guide Star Unit (WLGSU) near the William Herschel Telescope. CANARY is an open-loop Adaptive Optics (AO) system that uses multiple laser-guide stars and deformable mirrors, providing the first on-sky test of combined wide-field Laser Guide Star (LGS) tomography and open-loop AO control.
In preparation for the arrival of the WEAVE MOS spectrograph, and for the first time in 30 years, the WHTs inner top-end ring (flip ring) has been successfully removed, craned to the ground floor, and the next day, re-installed on the telescope.
Astronomers have discovered a new type of exotic binary star. In the system AR Scorpii a rapidly spinning white dwarf star powers electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star, and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio. The research is published in the journal Nature on 28 July 2016.
A team of astronomers reports the discovery of one of the very weakest magnetic fields ever securely detected in a white dwarf. The observation was made using the ISIS spectropolarimeter on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), in just one hour of exposure time and using the red and the blue arms of the spectrograph. This is part of a large survey of bright white dwarfs to search for such weak magnetic fields.
The Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI) on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) has obtained its first adaptive-optics closed-loop results, an important milestone in the development of this state-of-the-art instrument that aims at combining adaptive optics (AO) and lucky imaging (LI) to obtain the highest-ever resolution images at visible wavelengths from the ground.
A group of astronomers, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has found the first known case of three supernova remnants one inside the other. Using a method developed within the group for detecting huge expanding bubbles of gas in interstellar space, they were observing the galaxy M33 in our Local Group of galaxies and found an example of a triple-bubble. The results help to understand the feedback phenomenon, a fundamental process controlling star formation and the dissemination of metals produced in massive stars.
The William Herschel Telescope and the Milky Way towards the Galactic Centre. Visible from left to right: open cluster Messier 23, open cluster Messier 21, the Triffid Nebula or Messier 20, the Lagoon Nebula or Messier 8, and the Butterfly Cluster or Messier 6.
La Palma Music Festival gathers some of the best classical musicians from around the world. This year the Festival will pay tribute to William Herschel (1738-1822), the musician who became one of the most famous astronomers of his time. The Festival Orchestra directed by Thomas Mandl will perform William Herschels Symphony No.8 at Teatro Circo de Marte in Santa Cruz de La Palma on Tuesday 8th June.
Astronomers report high-spatial resolution, i band imaging of the multiple T Tauri system LkHa 262/LkHa 263 obtained during the first commissioning period of the Adaptive Optics Lucky Imager (AOLI) at the William Herschel Telescope on September 24th and 25th, 2013. AOLI is a state-of-the-art instrument which combines two well-proven techniques for extremely high spatial resolution with ground-based telescopes: Lucky Imaging (LI) and Adaptive Optics (AO). Although the instrument was not yet complete, and was not operated in Adaptive-Optics mode, these observations demonstrate the high capabilities of the LI mode, yielding a FWHM for the best PSF of only 0.15 arcsec.
Commissioning of PAUCam, the imager for the Physics of the Accelerating Universe survey, is complete, and routine science exploitation is under way (for first-light images, see earlier news item). PAUCam is a visiting instrument instrument at the WHT, and is available for use by astronomers from the ING community.
In a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers report catching V404 Cygni black hole while it was shimmering and emitting red flashes, some of which were shorter than a timespan of only 1/40th of a second.
We welcome applications for four places on the ING studentship programme 2016/17. The deadline for applications is 1st March 2016.
The programme provides a unique opportunity for up to four PhD, MSc
or undergraduate astronomy students to get hands-on experience of work
at an international observatory. Successful applicants will spend one
year on La Palma, supporting imaging and spectroscopy runs at the
2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and working on projects supervised
by the ING staff. The studentship programme is open to anyone, but
we particularly welcome applicants from our three partner countries:
the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 2 March 2016.
Interview with the ING director published on the local newspaper Diario de Avisos about "Una nueva vida para los telescopios Herschel y Newton" (in Spanish).
The European Space Agencys Rosetta mission is currently exploring comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The Rosetta mission is a hugely ambitious endeavour - the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and follow it on its journey towards the Sun, accompanied by its lander, Philae, which made the first ever landing on a comet in November 2014. Observatories across the planet are supporting this mission, and the ING is playing an important part in this - especially in providing unique observations this year as the comet passed its closest point to the Sun and highest level of activity.
An international team of astronomers have discovered a previously unknown link between the way young stars, white dwarfs and black holes grow feeding from their surroundings. Accretion seems to be a universal process operating in a similar way despite the different size, age, temperature and gravity of the accreted object.
Report on the encounter of NASAs New Horizons mission with Pluto and supporting observations provided by the William Herschel Telescope. Broadcast in the Spanish television (TVE) programme Informe Semanal on 1st August, 2015. See also WHT Observes Pluto in Support of NASAs New Horizons Mission.
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 31 August 2015.
These videos were made while the laser guide star system of CANARY was being used at the William Herschel Telescope on 29 June, 2015. CANARY is a wide-field laser guide star tomography and open-loop AO (MOAO) demonstrator with the goal of emulating a single channel of the proposed E-ELT MOAO instrument, EAGLE, albeit at 1/10th scale. By coincidence the videos were obtained on the night the King of Spain, Felipe VI, was invited to join the observations at Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of the Canarian Observatories.
The William Herschel Telescope (WHT) has participated in 2014 and 2015 in a worldwide campaign to spectroscopically follow up Pluto from the ground in support of the encounter of NASAs New Horizons spacecraft with Pluto.
olour-composite (RGB) image of the Cocoon nebula obtained from a combination of wide- and narrow-band images taken using the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the 2.5 m Isaac Newton Telescope. Only part of the CCD #4 is shown.
The camera for the PAU (Physics of the Accelerating Universe) project succesfully saw first light at the prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope on the night June 3rd. PAUCam is an advanced imager comprising a mosaic of 18 state-of-the-art, fully-depleted, red-sensitive Hamamatsu CCDs, and a field of view with a diameter of about one degree (or about 14 times the sky area covered by the WHTs current prime-focus imager), of which 40 arcminutes are unvignetted. PAUCam was designed and built by a consortium of Spanish institutions (IFAE, ICE-CSIC/IEEC and PIC from Barcelona; CIEMAT and IFT-UAM/CSIC from Madrid).
Water delivery via asteroids or comets is likely taking place in many other planetary systems, just as it happened on Earth, according to new evidence found that numerous planetary bodies, including asteroids and comets, contain large amounts of water.
Spectroscopic observations with the William Herschel Telescope of three planetary nebulae have shed new light on the abundance discrepancy problem. Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias have shown that the largest abundance discrepancies (as high as 300 in certain positions in the nebula) are reached in planetary nebulae that have a close binary central star.
Galaxies are often found in clusters, which contain many red and dead members that stopped forming stars in the distant past. Over billions of years, galaxy clusters build up structure in the universe - merging with adjacent clusters. When this happens, there is a huge release of energy as the clusters collide. The resulting shock wave travels through the cluster like a tsunami, but until now there was no evidence that the galaxies themselves were affected very much.
In 2014 the Isaac Newton Telescope became the first telescope in La Palma to discover and secure five Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) as part of the EURONEAR project and as a result of the allocation of several override programmes awarded by the time allocation committees.
"Con el William Herschel y el Satélite Gaia Trazaremos un Mapa de la Vía Láctea del Siglo XXI", an interview with the ING Director published in local online newspaper LaPalmaAhora.com
Astronomers observed star KIC 12557548 on five nights in July 2013, using ULTRACAM on the William Herschel Telescope, to search for the colour dependence of the transit depth by KIC 12557548 b exoplanet. A clear transit signal was detected only on the first night. During the remaining four nights, the planet was in a quiescent period, with little or no dust cloud obscuring the star. As expected, the astronomers managed to observe differences in transit depths between three different bands on first night, with an increase in depth toward shorter wavelengths. This effect is consistent with extinction from the putative dust cloud surrounding the planet. Remaining nights allowed to constrain the size of the planet to less than 5.4 radii of Mercury.
We welcome applications for four places on the ING studentship programme 2015/16. The deadline for applications is: Tuesday 1st May 2015.
The programme provides a unique opportunity for up to four PhD, MSc
or undergraduate astronomy students to get hands-on experience of work
at an international observatory. Successful applicants will spend one
year on La Palma, supporting imaging and spectroscopy runs at the
Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) 2.5m and working on projects supervised
by the ING staff. The studentship programme is open to anyone, but
we particularly welcome applicants from our three partner countries:
the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.
The international conference Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade. Big Questions, Large Surveys and Wide Fields (Santa Cruz de La Palma, 2-6 March 2015) organised by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, was presented to the media on La Palma during a press conference that took place in the Townhall.
An international group of astronomers has found the first pair of white dwarfs with a total combined mass unequivocally above the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses. The orbital period of the system is 4.2 hours, which means that the stars are close enough to spiral in due to the emission of gravitational waves and eventually merge in about 700 million years. This finding, which has been published in Nature, provides observational support to the double-degenerate path of formation of type Ia supernovae, so far a theoretical possibility under ongoing debate.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for
International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 29th February, 2016.
More information: http://www.otri.iac.es/cci
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 1 March and no requests for late submissions will be accepted.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for
International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 28th February, 2015.
More information: http://www.otri.iac.es/cci
Stellar occultations by minor bodies have been widely used to measure their sizes and constrain their shapes. One such event was observed at the William Herschel Telescope during the first hours of the night April 26, 2012 using ULTRACAM, a very fast camera able to obtain short exposures with very short overheads. They were able to measure a total eclipse duration of 20.87 seconds which translates into a chord of 41
hanks to the high time resolution of ULTRACAM and the large aperture of the William Herschel Telescope, astronomers recorded the most accurate chord ever obtained for an occultation by a Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO), with a length of 415. This is a lower limit to the size of (119951) 2002 KX14 assuming it has a spherical shape.
The production of the catalogue, IPHAS DR2 (the second release from the survey programme The INT Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plan
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes is pleased to announce an international conference Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys and Wide Fields, to be held in Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands from 2nd to 6th March 2015.
Most users of the ING telescopes are well aware that our plans for the continued operation of the WHT and INT in the next decade call for the execution of massive spectroscopic surveys with WEAVE, a multi-fibre spectrograph now in construction for the WHT prime focus.
Most users of the ING telescopes are well aware that our plans for the continued operation of the WHT and INT in the next decade call for the execution of massive spectroscopic surveys with WEAVE, a multi-fibre spectrograph now in construction for the WHT prime focus. Until the arrival of WEAVE, planned for late-2017, ING will continue to offer a broad range of instrumentation at the WHT and on the INT.
The Board of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes solicits Letters of Intent to provide new or improved instrumentation for the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope, and/or upgrades to the telescope infrastructure. Deadline 30 September 2014.
Ou4 is a recently discovered bipolar outflow with a projected size of more than one degree in the plane of the sky. It is apparently centred on a young stellar cluster - whose most massive representative is the triple system HR 8119 - inside the HII region Sh 2-129. The apparent position of Ou4 and the properties deduced in this study are consistent with the hypothesis that Ou4 is located inside the Sh 2-129 HII region, suggesting that it was launched some 90,000 yrs ago by HR 8119.
The OPTICON common TAC call for EU supported access to telescopes in semester 2015A has been opened.
The announcement is here:
http://www.astro-opticon.org/fp7-2/tna/opticon_call_new.html
Random numbers represent a fundamental ingredient for secure communications and numerical simulation as well as to games and in general to Information
Science. Physical processes with intrinsic unpredictability may be exploited to generate genuine random numbers. The optical propagation in strong
atmospheric turbulence is here taken to this purpose, by observing a laser beam after a 143 km free-space path, between the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope
on La Palma and the ESA Optical Ground Station at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife.
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes is pleased to announce an international conference Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys and Wide Fields, to be held in Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands from 2nd to 6th March 2015.
2014 LU14 is the first ever Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) discovered using the Isaac Newton Telescope and from La Palma. This discovery is also the first reported by the EURONEAR network, a large collaboration founded by ING astronomer Ovidiu Vaduvescu which involves researchers and telescopes mostly based in European countries.
Using the integral field spectrograph OASIS, at the William Herschel Telescope, combined with the adaptive optics module NAOMI, astronomers obtained optical observations of the FU Ori star V1515 Cyg with an angular resolution of 0.7 arcseconds (Gaussian core FWHM). From the analysis of the data they find evidence for the existence of a surrounding disk in V1515, being this one of the few spatial inferences of a disk observed in an FU Ori object.
A large international team led by Klaas Wiersema from the University of Leicester
has discovered circularly polarised optical emission in the afterglow of GRB 121024A.
The study, published in Nature, used data mainly from FORS2 on the VLT, but also ACAM on the WHT. The ACAM data allowed the team to correctly identify a break in the light curve that confirmed the long standing prediction that an abrupt change of 90 degrees in the GRB linear polarisation happens when the Lorentz factor of the outwards jet decreases below a critical value.
On the 21st January 2014 astronomers reported the discovery of supernova SN2014J which reached its peak brightness on the 31st January. Some days later, this type Ia supernova started to fade. The image above demonstrates that SN2014J (marked with black lines) continued to be the brightest optical object in the galaxy even one month after the discovery.
Using Fabry-Perot optical interferometers, including GHaFaS on the William Herschel Telescope, and observing a sample of over a
hundred nearby galaxies, astronomers have discovered that there are more density waves than predicted by theory, and that there
are relations between them forming a complex pattern of resonances, which orchestrate the Music of the Galaxies.
The snappily-named Comet C/2012 S1 ISON travelled from the very edges of our solar system on a one way ticket around the sun. As it was heating up there was intense speculation about whether it would develop a beautiful tail or just break apart. In November 2013 a team of BBCs The Sky at Night used the Isaac Newton telescopes to go comet chasing. Video available at the BBC web site.
In order to focus the observatorys resources on the WEAVE project, ING is planning a rationalisation of its instrument suite, which will likely imply a progressive reduction in
the number of common-user instruments/modes offered at the WHT and INT, starting in semester 2015A
The OPTICON common TAC call for EU supported access to telescopes in semester 2014B has been opened.
The announcement is here:
http://www.astro-opticon.org/fp7-2/tna/opticon_call_new.html
Before the launch of Kepler, an extensive programme to identify bright G/K dwarfs with minimial stellar activity was carried out by various groups internationally. Although a small number of photometric variability surveys were carried out pre-launch they were either not especially deep, did not have wide sky coverage or did not have a cadence shorter than a few minutes. To fill this gap a team of astronomers started a photometric variability survey (RATS-Kepler) in the summer of 2011 using the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT). RATS-Kepler is complementary to the Kepler-INT-Survey
Extra INT call for semester 2014A. After reviewing the proposals for the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) it turned out that several nights are still available for Dutch astronomers. The time allocation committee has decided to offer a second chance for the Dutch astronomers to apply for these nights. Deadline
The bipolar planetary nebula (PN) Sh2-71 lies in the constellation of Aquila at a distance of 1 kpc. It was discovered by Rudolph Minkowski in 1946. Shortly after the discovery, the central star (the brightest star in the centre of the nebula) was identified to be a variable with a quasi-sinusoidal lightcurve with an amplitude of 0.8 magnitudes. Later observations showed sharp brightness dips, possibly eclipses, with a period of 17.2 days. Besides an unusual lightcurve, it also exhibits pronounced spectral variations.
NGC 660 is a polar ring galaxy at a distance of about 43 million light years in the constellation of Pisces. Polar ring galaxies are named as such because a substantial proportion of the stellar population, gas and dust orbit the galaxy is placed in rings around the nucleus. These rings are thought to be created by interaction with a neighbouring galaxy.
The Dutch TV channel Nederland 1 broadcasted a 13-minute item on exoplanets filmed on La Palma and at the ING on the 30th of November, 2013. It is an item for the general public (i.e. EenVandaag is not a programme focusing on science but on news issues) and to bring an enthusiastic story of young people focusing on astronomy. The bit about the William Herschel Telescope and ExPo extreme polarimeter starts just before half way through the broadcast. Video available at the Nederland 1 web site.
The Isaac Newton Telescope Contributes to Near Earth Asteroid Research. Two recently published papers on Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) demonstrate the increasing role of the Isaac Newton Telescope in precovering, recovering and discovering NEAs.
A team of 23 young astronomers, working at ING or elsewhere, and amateur astronomers, led by ING astronomer Ovidiu Vaduvescu, mined several imaging archives, observed and analysed the data, and eventually became the authors of the papers
The caterpillar-shaped knot, called IRAS 20324+4057, is a protostar in a very early evolutionary stage. It is still in the process of collecting material from an envelope of gas surrounding it. However, that envelope is being eroded by the radiation from Cygnus OB2. Protostars in this region should eventually become young stars with final masses about one to ten times that of our Sun, but if the eroding radiation from the nearby bright stars destroys the gas envelope before the protostars finish accreting, the final masses of the protostars may be reduced. The object lies 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.
Some of the 11 known active asteroids originate in the main asteroid belt and thus are known as main belt comets (MBCs), one of the last discovered being P/2012 T1 (PANSTARRS). Thanks to the possibility of target-of-opportunity observations at the WHT and GTC, a team of Spanish astronomers followed up its evolution and revealed the origin of its cometary activity.
CANARY is an open-loop Adaptive Optics system deployed on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope from July 2010. CANARY uses multiple laser guide stars and deformable mirrors and will be the instrument that provides the first on-sky test of combined wide-field LGS tomography and open-loop AO control. On-sky validation of these combined techniques will be performed with the goal of emulating a single channel of the proposed E-ELT MOAO instrument, EAGLE, albeit at 1/10th scale. The EAGLE webpages contain many examples of the type of science that could be performed with such an MOAO instrument on the E-ELT.
ING hosts the 11th NEON Observing School from July 14 to July 27, 2013. NEON stands for the Network of European Observatories in the North. The NEON Observing Schools are supported by OPTICON.
A rare encounter between two gas-rich galaxies indicates a solution to the problem
of how giant elliptical galaxies developed so quickly in the early universe and why they stopped producing stars soon after.
Astronomers of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES) project announce today in the journal Nature the discovery of an unsually massive, maximum-starburst galaxy at a
redshift of 6.34, or when the Universe was only 880 million years old. Because current theories of galaxy fomation and evolution
predict smaller galaxies with slower rates of star production in the early Universe, the detection of such a galaxy is challenging.
The Elephants Trunk nebula, formally known as IC1396A, is a cloud of gas and dust located 2400 light years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. The Elephant Trunk is part of a larger region of ionized gas illuminated by a nearby massive O-type star (located outside the image to the left). Radiation and winds from this hot star compress and ionize the edges of cloud, resulting in the bright ionization fronts seen in this image.
A Tumbling Satellite from Babak Tafreshi on Vimeo. The dome of the Isaac Newton Telescope appears in the foreground. Also available at The World at Night web site.
Recent William Herschel Telescope observations have revealed a new view of the accretion process in V455 And, an intermediate polar with a very rapidly spinning white dwarf.
This white dwarf, which is a star that is only as large as the Earth but about half as massive as the Sun, spins around its axis in just over one minute, and is the third fastest-spinning
white dwarf known.
ULTRACAM is an ultra-fast, triple-beam CCD camera designed to study
astrophysics on the fastest timescales. The instrument was built by a
consortium involving the Universities of Sheffield (Vik Dhillon), Warwick (Tom Marsh) and the UK
Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh. It saw first light
on the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma in 2002. The large quantity of observing time awarded
to ULTRACAM (totalling one year of nights over the last decade) on
some of the worlds largest telescopes is testament to the
competitiveness of the science performed with the instrument.
The OPTICON common TAC call for EU supported access to telescopes in semester 2013B has been opened.
It will close at exactly 23:59 UT on 28th February 2013. The announcement is here:
http://www.astro-opticon.org/fp7/tna/opticon_call_new.html
The role of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the formation and evolution of galaxies is still not well established. Some authors claim that AGN are key in quenching star
formation in their host galaxies through so-called AGN feedback, which has been invoked to explain the well-established correlations between supermassive-black-hole (SMBH)
mass and host-galaxy properties. In order to understand the importance of AGN feedback in the star-formation histories of galaxies, it is necessary
to study how the star formation rate (SFR) in active galaxies evolves with redshift.
On Friday 11 January 2013 the Royal Astronomical Society (UK) awarded the 2013 RAS Group award to the SAURON team. SAURON is an integral field spectrograph with a 33 x 44
arcseconds field of view at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. Although it can be used for other astrophysical investigations, the particular
science focus of the team that set up the SAURON project was understanding the evolution of elliptical
galaxies, via detailed observations of samples of nearby examples of these objects.
A team of Dutch astronomers designed and built the innovative
imaging polarimeter ExPo (the Extreme Polarimeter), which is a regular
visitor instrument at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). ExPo makes use of polarised light to study the faint,
dust-rich environments around young and evolved stars.
After thirty years of investigation, a team of scientists from six European countries reports that the hypergiant star HR 8752 is partially traversing the Yellow Evolutionary Void,
an area in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram empty of hypergiant stars with surface temperatures between 5000 and 12000 degrees kelvin. Some of the observations were carried out
using the Utrecht Echelle Spectrograph (UES, now retired) on the William Herschel Telescope.
The formation of asymmetric structures such as rings and jets in
planetary nebulae (PNe) has been a matter of debate for a long time. The
most popular hypothesis is that these features are produced in
interacting binaries. Using data obtained with ACAM imager and spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope,
for the first time astronomers have been able to reliably relate jet ejections to mass transfer and accretion in a
close binary in a planetary nebula.
GK Per (Nova Persei 1901) nova remnant is the result of a remarkable nearby nova exploded in 1901 which reached the
brightness of the star Vega at its maximum. It was the first object around which, superluminal light echoes where observed.
The actual ejecta of the outburst became visible 15 years later in 1916. Ever since, the ejecta has been monitored in
several wavelengths in narrow- and broad-band filters. This study shows that the nova ejecta is a thick knotty shell in
which knots expand with a significant range of velocities. A movie shows the evolution of the remnant from 1953 to 2011 using data mainly from the
INT/WFC and INT/IDS.
Astronomers at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (UK) have reported the discovery of a cold veil of halo stars in the
very outskirts of the Milky Way. They obtained the radial velocities of a sample of distant halo stars located from 80 to
150 kiloparsecs from the
center of our Galaxy using the ISIS spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), among others.
The two most distant stars in this sample are Carbon stars observed with WHT/ISIS, and to date,
they are the most distant field Galactic halo stars with radial-velocity measurements.
Physicists at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have successfully
transmitted quantum states between La Palma (from the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope) and Tenerife,
over a record distance of 143 km. This experiment provides the basis for a worldwide information
network, in which quantum mechanical effects enable the exchange of messages with greater security,
and allow certain calculations to be performed more efficiently than with conventional technologies.
In such a future quantum internet, quantum teleportation will be a key protocol for the transmission
of information between quantum computers.
Light Years exhibition is a journey into the memory of the universe. A memory that begins in the stars and is gathered inside the elemental particles that make up matter. It is a hymn to the complexity of the light that creates life
in its path. It is an opportunity to remember that everything in existence was once nothing but star dust. The
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes has collaborated in this exhibition.
From spectra collected during the August 2008 lunar eclipse, astronomers have been able to investigate the in-transit signature of the Earth-Sun system as would be observed from outside the solar system.
They found that the refraction of sunlight as it passes through a planetary atmosphere similar to the Earths contributes prominently to the in-transit transmission spectrum.
This research has important implications for future attempts to characterise the atmospheres of Earth-like extrasolar planets, especially those in similar long-period orbits.
The Herbig-Haro object 30 (HH30) is located in the L1551 dark cloud, at a distance of about 140 parsec, in the Taurus star-forming region. HH30 is considered a prototypical jet-disk
system driven by a young stellar object (YSO). The impressive jet/counterjet structure extends several arcminutes in both directions from the exciting source, and shows an undulating morphology
in the narrow-band [SII] images. Astronomers using ACAM at the William Herschel Telescope have been able to obtain a deep image of the HH30 field and have found an
interesting explanation for the jet/counterjet system
The Kepler-INT Survey is a deep 5-filter optical survey of the Kepler field, made with the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. The observing strategy and
data reduction method are identical with those used in the IPHAS and UVEX galactic plane surveys and involves scientists from all ING partner communities.
The OPTICON common TAC call for EU supported access to telescopes in semester 2013A has been opened.
It will close at exactly 1200 UT on 2nd September 2012. The announcement is here:
http://www.astro-opticon.org/fp7/tna/opticon_call_new.html
A group of astronomers from the IAC and CEFCA have reported the discovery of a massive stellar cluster in the Milky Way. The discovery is part of the MASGOMAS project (MAssive Stars in Galactic Obscured MAssive clusterS), a systematic search for massive galactic stellar clusters.
The massive nature of the cluster has been confirmed using LIRIS imaging, and long-slit and multi-object spectroscopy, on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT).
The William Herschel Telescope takes pride of place on the front cover of Astronomy magazines special summer 2012 issue. This issue is a picture-packed guided tour of the worlds major observatories,
highlighting the beauty of the locations as much as the scientific achievements. It includes an article about the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, written by ING staff Chris Benn,
Javier
This is an image of NGC 2359, better known as the Thors Helmet nebula, obtained using the Wide-Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope.
NGC 2359 is actually more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubbles center sweeps through a
surrounding molecular cloud. The central star is an extremely hot giant Wolf-Rayet star thought to be in a brief,
pre-supernova stage of evolution.
A group of 8 Sheffield MPhys students visited La Palma for one week to undertake their third-year astronomy project using pt5m, the Durham-Sheffield 0.5m robotic telescope on the roof of the WHT.
The trip, which was led by Professor Vik Dhillon, was a great success and will hopefully now be an annual fixture in the Sheffield Astrophysics MPhys degree programme.
Astronomers from the Atlas3D team, using the SAURON integral-field spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope, have found that some of the oldest galaxies in the
Universe have three times as much stellar mass, and as many more stars, than all current models of galaxy evolution predict.
This result means that the models, which assumed for decades that the light we observe from a galaxy can be used to infer its stellar mass, will have to be revised.
A report of the research is published in Nature on 26 April 2012.
IC 1396 in the constellation Cepheus imaged in the red light from hydrogen atoms.
This image was obtained as part of the INT/WFC Photometric Hydrogen-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS).
Credit: Geert Barentsen & Jorick Vink (Armagh Observatory) & the IPHAS Collaboration.
Observations using the OASIS integral field spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope have
revealed a long, thin plume of ionised gas stretching out from the
brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) of Abell 2146 (z=0.243) (Canning et al.
2012). Extended optical emission-line nebulae are not uncommon in the
cores of clusters, but the discovery of this particular structure is
unexpected, as the host cluster is in the throes of a major merger event
A consensus has emerged amongst the partner countries that the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) will play a crucial role in the partners national astronomy programmes over the next decade. At the ING, we have worked closely with our user communities from the UK, the Netherlands and Spain, and with our funding agencies (STFC, NWO and IAC), to agree on the scientific priorities and how to deliver them.
Upcoming workshop: "La Palma and Calar Alto Observatories, Science in the Next Decade" (Madrid, 22-23 March 2012).We announce a two-day workshop organised by ING together with our colleaguesat the Calar Alto Observatory. Registration deadline: 5 March (with presentation), 15 March (without)
INGs plans for the coming decade were presented to STFC Science Board in November 2011. In order to reach a decision by April 2012, Science Board set up a sub-group to examine our proposal
(and that presented for JCMT and UKIRT). STFCs announcement is at http://www.stfc.ac.uk/About+STFC/38392.aspx . The deadline for submission of your inputs is 22 February 2012.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for
International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 28th February, 2013.
More information: http://www.otri.iac.es/cci
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access Programme is now open with a
deadline of 12:00 UT on 29 February 2012
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for
International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 29th February, 2012. More information: http://www.iac.es/eno.php?op1=5&op2=13&op3=26&lang=e
The ING is pleased to announce a special call for service proposals to use the ULTRACAM instrument. Up to five bright nights are available at the beginning of February 2012.
ULTRACAM is a high-speed, three channel CCD camera ideally suited for fast photometry. Please see the details of the announcement, including a description of ULTRACAM and
the proposal submission procedure, at http://www.ing.iac.es/astronomy/observing/ULTRACAM.pdf. The deadline for receipt of proposals is midnight on Friday 20th January, Canarian/UK time.
The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom announces its intention to make the Jakobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) available free of charge to a suitable party who is interested in taking control of the scientific exploitation of the telescope.
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) contributed data to the research which led to the award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to Professor Saul Perlmutter of UC-Berkeley.
Using wide-field imaging techniques implemented on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in the early nineties, and subsequent imaging and spectroscopy using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), among others,
the Supernova Cosmology Project team led by Perlmutter discovered that the expansion of the Universe, long-believed to be decelerating due to the effects of gravitational attraction, was in fact accelerating, that is,
galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago.
This result provided the foundation for the current, widely-accepted model of the Universe, in which the dynamics are dominated by what is called dark energy.
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access Programme is now open with a deadline of 12:00 UT on 31 August 2011
Since Edwin Hubble introduced his famous tuning fork diagram more than 70 years ago, spiral galaxies and early-type galaxies have been regarded as being two distinct families.
A known issue of Hubbl
The report of the UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee inquiry into astronomy and particle-physics research in the UK is now publicly available
ING is establishing a European consortium to develop a spectrograph, WEAVE, for the prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope. WEAVE will be able to take spectra of up to 1000 objects simultaneously, within a 2-deg field of view. First light is envisioned in 2016.
XTE J1859+226 is a transient X-ray binary discovered in 1999 by the X-ray
satellite RXTE. This type of binary system stays in quiescence for most of its life; however, from
time-to-time the system can show an outburst at all wavelengths which can subsequently be detected by X-ray satellites. By combining the data taken using the INT and the WHT in 2000 with the
photometry taken in 2008 with NOT, WHT and spectra from GTC, a lower limit to the mass of the black hole was set to 5.42 solar masses
Galaxy Zoo Supernovae (GZS) is a proof-of-concept project which uses members of the public to identify supernova candidates from the latest generation of wide-field imaging transient surveys. GZS was first tested on two specific occasions
supporting Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) spectroscopic follow-up observations at the William Herschel Telescope, in 2009 August and October.
16 of 20 candidates were observed by the WHT; 15 were confirmed as SNe, with one cataclysmic variable. Since 2010 April, GZS has been running full-time on PTF candidates and by 2010 July 15 had classified around 13,900 SN
candidates at the rate of several hundred candidates per observing night. SGZ team members continue to use the WHT to confirm and follow up the SN candidates being discovered
The INT Support and Research Studentship programme offers astronomy and astrophysics Ph.D. students the unique opportunity to spend one year at the ING
as support astronomers at the INT. The students are expected to continue with their Ph.D. theses while working at ING. Students will get astronomy related project work from ING.
In addition, they can get involved in further research with ING staff astronomers. Ph.D. students working in any field of observational astronomy are welcome. Deadline for applications is April 7th, 2011.
We regret to announce that Lionel passed away last Friday, 18th March. For more than 20 years, Lionel was the usual taxi driver for visitors to INGs telescopes, and many astronomers around the world will remember him with affection. We will all miss him
The UK parliamentary Science and Technology Committee has launched an inquiry into astronomy and particle-physics research in the UK. The parliamentary committee invites comments, by February 16th
The call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access Programme is now open with a deadline of 12:00 UT on 28 February 2011
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for
International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 28th February, 2011. More information: http://www.iac.es/eno.php?op1=5&op2=13&op3=26&lang=e
A Franco-British team has demonstrated for the first time on-sky the feasibility of so-called Multi-Object Adaptive Optics (MOAO). MOAO provides the high spatial resolution delivered by current adaptive-optics systems, but over a much larger field of view, allowing many objects to be observed simultaneously. The demonstration was made with the purpose-built CANARY instrument installed at the Nasmyth focus of the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma. Analysis of the first results obtained in September 2010 shows that CANARY delivered the expected performance the first time it was used - a spectacular success.
This image is part of the Eastern Veil Nebula, or NGC 6992, and it was obtained using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. It is a three-colour composite made from data collected using filters to isolate
the light emitted by hydrogen alpha (H-alpha), doubly ionised oxygen (OIII) and ionised sulfur (SII) atoms, and coded in the image as red, green and blue respectively. Credit: D. L
New control systems are being implemented for all the instruments on the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope. The new systems are based on PLC
(programmable logic controllers) and Ethernet technology, and are faster, and much easier to maintain, than the old 4MS/RS232 systems originally
implemented at the telescope over 20 years ago. The re-engineering is all being carried out in-house at ING
This image of the Crescent Nebula or NGC 6888 was obtained using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. It is a three-colour composite made from data collected using filters to
isolate the light emitted by hydrogen alpha (H-alpha) and doubly ionised oxygen (OIII) atoms
Conventional CCD detectors have two major disadvantages: they are slow to read out and they
suffer from read noise. These problems combine to make high-speed spectroscopy of faint targets
the most demanding of astronomical observations. It is possible to overcome these weaknesses
by using electron-multiplying CCDs (EMCCDs). EMCCDs are conventional frame-transfer
CCDs, but with an extended serial register containing high-voltage electrodes. The recently released ING technical note no. 132 summarises the research and the implementation of EMCCDs at ING
Visiting the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope on La Palma with the astronomy master students of Leuven (BEL) and Amsterdam (NED). Credit: Peter I Papic.
This image of the Ring Nebula or Messier 57 was obtained using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. It is a three-colour composite made from data collected using
filters to isolate the light emitted by hydrogen alpha (H-alpha), doubly ionised oxygen (OIII) and ionised sulfur (SII) atoms
Comet-like object P/2010 A2 was discovered by the LINEAR survey on January 6, 2010. Service observations carried out using ACAM on the William Herschel Telescope on January 21, 2010, show an asteroidal nucleus detached from the dust tail. Owing to its orbital parameters and its cometary appearance, the object is classified as a main-belt comet, in other words, an activated asteroid from the main asteroid belt. Comet P/2010 A2s orbit is the nearest to the Sun known so far, for this kind of object (semi-major axis of 2.29 AU)
A team of scientists from the Instituto Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Texas using the WHT and HET has succeeded in identifying one of the most complex
organic molecules yet found in the material between the stars, the so-called interstellar medium. The discovery of anthracene could help resolve a decades-old astrophysical mystery
concerning the production of organic molecules in space
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes offers astronomy PhD students theopportunity to work for one year (starting September) as supportastronomers at the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope at the Roque de losMuchachos observatory on La Palma, while continuing work on their PhDs.
Within the OPTICON contract under FP7, its Trans-National Access programme will move towards even greater integration and coordination of the participating telescopes. As part of this move, the funding for the programme will be pooled, and the proposals for OPTICON time at all the telescopes will be reviewed together by a single international Time Allocation Committee (TAC) to ensure network-wide competition and uniform review criteria
Bringing together astronomers from the ING communities to discuss scientific applications and instrument development plans for the WHT in the coming decade.
Our strategic vision of the WHT for the next decade is that of a telescope that operates a range of instruments offered for classical observing on a large fraction of the year, while we increase the time devoted to
surveys with key instruments with strategic importance to our communities - instruments where a 4m telescope delivers more science than larger telescopes.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM, La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for International Time Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories. Deadline is 28th February, 2010. More information: http://www.iac.es/eno.php?op1=5&op2=13&op3=26&lang=e
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) are pleased to note that the announcement made by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) on December 16th, 2009, clarifies the continued role of STFC as
owner and manager of the ING until the expiration of the International Agreements for the Canarian Observatories. These agreements are for renewal in 2012
The institutions present at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (IAC) help to collect funds to help those affected by recent fire in the South of La Palma. The prize will be an observing night on the JKT,
using the finder and the naked eye.
A versatile new high-throughput imager and spectrograph, ACAM, was successfully commissioned on the William Herschel Telescope in June 2009, and is now available for use by the astronomical community.
Dr Marc Balcells, a tenured researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, has been appointed Director of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes. He will begin his new role with effect from 15 July 2009.
As we get closer to finding analogues of Earth, an important consideration for the characterization of extrasolar planetary atmospheres is what the transmission spectrum of our planet looks like. Recently a team of astronomers, using LIRIS on the William Herschel Telescope and ALFOSC on the Nordic Optical Telescope simultaneously, have been able to obtain for the first time the optical and near-infrared transmission spectrum of the Earth during a lunar eclipse.
Astronomers at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) have recently used, for the first ever time, an electron-multiplying detector for astronomical spectroscopic observations, allowing a high-time resolution analysis of the orbital motion of a short orbital period cataclysmic variable.
The ASTRONET Science Vision and Infrastructures Roadmaps concluded that there is an urgent need to define a strategy for 2-4m telescopes at the European Level.Vital community input is now sought via a web based tool created for the purpose. The main consultation period begins now and continues until the end of July.
The Near Universe Advisory Panel (NUAP) is one of five advisory panels to the STFCs Science Committee for Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics. NUAP is inviting the community to take part in a web-based consultation to help it develop a roadmap with the current and future research opportunities.
The INT Support and Research Studentship programme offers astronomy and astrophysics Ph.D. students the unique opportunity to spend one year at the ING as support astronomers at the INT. The students can continue with their Ph.D. theses while working at ING. In addition, they can get involved in further research with ING staff astronomers. Ph.D. students working in any field of observational astronomy are welcome.
Having less than 24 hours in which to act, astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope have been able to obtain the only spectrum
of an asteroid which hit the Earth, establishing the first direct link between an asteroid and a meteorite.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM,La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for InternationalTime Programmes (ITP) in semesters 2009B and 2010A on telescopes installed at these Observatories.
Astronomers have made an unexpected find using PlanetPol on the William Herschel Telescope, that has the potential to affect future climate models. University of Hertfordshire astronomers were making observations of the stars in search of new planets, when
their measurements became affected by a layer of dust. Scientists normally assume that aerosols, including mineral dust, have random orientation in the atmosphere, but the team members say the polarizing affect the dust was having on the light
could only be the result of dust particles being vertically aligned.
The WHT makes the first ever ground-based near-infrared detection of an extrasolar planet. TrES-3b, as it is called, is just a little larger than Jupiter, yet orbits around its
parent star much closer than Mercury does, making it a "hot jupiter". As the planet disappears behind the star, the light coming from the whole system decreases because of the absence of the planets light,
allowing astronomers precise measurements of the light emitted by the planet. This way of detecting direct light coming from an extrasolar planet is also referred as the secondary eclipse method.
The International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) was a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture, highlighted by the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei. The aim of the Year was to stimulate worldwide interest, especially among young people, in astronomy and science under the central theme The Universe, Yours to Discover.
A team of astronomers has reported the first evidence for the presence of naphthalene cation in a region of the interestellar medium. This identification adds support to the
hypothesis that this type of molecules could play an important role in the formation of prebiotic molecules present in the protoplanetary material
This first STFC e-Christmas card competition is open to school children within the 11-16 age group across the UK. The winners will be awarded with a trip to La Palma and a visit to the ING telescopes.
Using the Millenium Galaxy Catalogue, compiled with data obtained with the Isaac Newton Telescope, astronomers have calculated that the Universe is actually twice as bright as previously thought. In the latest Astrophysical Journal Letters (10th May), the astronomers describe how dust is obscuring approximately half of the light that the Universe is currently generating.
The ING will host the 7th NEON Observing School from June 23 to July 05, 2008. NEON stands for the Network of European Observatories in the North and the NEON Observing Schools are supported by
OPTICON and the European Astronomical Society (EAS). The aim of the NEON summer schools is to provide the opportunity for young researchers to gain practical experience in observational techniques,
data reduction and analysis and the use of virtual observatory tools.
Evidence for the detection of a third body orbiting around the eclipsing binary CM Draconis has been obtained using binary stellar eclipse timing method for the first time.
Although binary or multiple stars are very frequent in our Galaxy, to date no unambiguously circumbinary planets had been detected.
A team of Spanish astronomers has identified a stellar companion near the deuterium-burning mass limit located at a very wide distance, or 670 astronomical units, from the brown dwarf UScoCTIO 108 in
the very young Upper Scorpius association. Although other substellar pairs with similar mass ratio are known, the system UScoCTIO 108A and B is the widest identified so far and possibly has a lower gravitational bound energy than any other known low-mass binary.
The origin of the diffuse interstellar bands is a long-standing observational problem that now can see some light. A systematic survey of post-AGB stars, conducted by a team of Spanish and Dutch astronomers, has demonstrated for the first time that the carriers of the diffuse bands cannot be present in circumstellar envelopes. The result has been highlighted in Astronomy & Astrophysics journal this week and it indeed places the origin of the diffuse bands in the interstellar medium.
The ING is pleased to announce a special call for proposals to the WHT service programme, for up to 18 nights scheduled from May to July this year.
This opportunity, which extends to all our communities, has arisen out of the wish to exploit the newly commissioned laser guide star beacon, GLAS, working in conjunction with the NAOMI Adaptive Optics module and associated instrumentation.
Proposals should be submitted by 29th February 2008 through the usual web application forms at the ING Service Programme web pages.
The Dutch Astronomy Olympiad 2008 is aimed at high school students, raising interest for science studies with an emphasis on astronomy. And as in its previous edition, the winner of the final will be awarded with a trip to La Palma and observations with the Isaac Newton Telescope.
Some individual objects from the Galaxy Zoo project have gained a lot of attention from the public; the most famous of these is the ghost-like Voorwerp (the Dutch word for object), which was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkle. Observations with the William Herschel, among others, led astronomers to the conclusion that this object consists of a cloud of highly ionized gas.
The IPHAS collaboration, together with CASU and Astrogrid has announced the availability of the IPHAS Initial Data Release (IDR). The INT/WFC Photometric Halpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane is an imaging survey being carried out in
H-alpha, Sloan r and Sloan i bands with the Wide Field Camera (WFC) on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) to a depth of r=20. The IPHAS IDR is a photometric catalogue of more than 200 million objects coupled with associated imaging data
covering about 1700 square degrees three colours.
FastCam is an imaging camera that takes very short exposures in the optical wavelength range. By selecting the data least affected by the atmospheric turbulence,
FastCam can produce very high-resolution images (10^-2 arcseconds). The instrument had been tested previously on other telescopes, and on the 27th of november it visited the William Herschel Telescope for the first time.
The International Scientific Committee (CCI) of the Roque de los Muchachos (ORM,La Palma) and Teide (OT, Tenerife) observatories invites applications for InternationalTime Programmes (ITP) on telescopes installed at these Observatories.
A team from the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in collaboration with scientists from Durham University in the
United Kingdom and from the University of Leiden and the ASTRON institute in The Netherlands have developed and
commissioned at the William Herschel Telescope on the island of La Palma the first ground-layer adaptive optics system in
the world that can be used for general astronomical observations.
The WASP and SOPHIE collaboration has announced the discovery of WASP-3b, one of the hottest exoplanets discovered so far. At a temperature of more than 1700 degrees Celsius WASP-3b
has the potential to place stringent constraints on exoplanet atmospheric models. The adaptive optics system of the William Herschel Telescope
was used to exclude the possibility of a nearby eclipsing-binary system being the cause of the transits.
Astronomers from the Rochester Institute of Technology and from University of Hertfordshire have obtained the first observational evidence that outflows from active galactic nuclei originate as winds from rotating accretion disks surrounding a super-massive black hole. Such evidence came from observations of quasar PG 1700+518 made by ISIS spectrograph in spectropolarimetric mode on the William Herschel Telescope.
The Isaac Newton Telescope pointed to the comet 17P/Holmes just after the sunset of the following night to the outburst, and it has
been tracking its evolution since then.
The discovery that the expansion of the Universe is currently accelerating was achieved using the most powerful telescopes in the
world, and in particular, the members of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) team have been using the telescopes of the Isaac Newton Group
since the early nineties extensively.
For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a double stellar explosion at exactly the same position on the sky suggesting the death of a massive star
From July 6th to July 12th a new private instrument for the WHT, GHaFaS, saw its first run.The acronym GHaFaS stands for Galaxy Halpha Fabry-Perot System, and gives an idea of the nature and the prime use of the instrument.
It is a new generation FP interferometer, whose chief and powerful advantage over traditional systems which have been used on telescopes is the high sensitivity photon counting detector
Astronomers have been able to identify about 1600 dwarf galaxies in the Coma galaxy cluster, which are likely to be either part of a population of low-surface-brightness dwarf galaxies or too red to be detected in the existing optical surveys.
Astronomers have been able to obtain accurate and empirical measurements of the the masses and radii of the component stars of a new low mass eclipsing binary system. JW 380, as it is called, comprises a 0.26, 0.15 solar-mass pre main sequence stars and it is located in the very young Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). More information: http://www.ing.iac.es/PR/press/orion.html
El Grupo de Telescopios Isaac Newton y el Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias organizan del 18 al 22 de junio en el Hotel H10 Taburiente Playa en Los Cancajos (La Palma) un congreso internacional de astrofisica para discutir sobre la naturaleza de las nebulosas planetarias asimetricas, objetos celestes cuya morfologia y evolucion son motivo de un intenso estudio y debate entre los astrofisicos.
Con motivo del congreso internacional de astrofisica que se celebra en Los Cancajos (La Palma), el proximo viernes 22 de junio a las 20:00 horas tendra lugar una conferencia publica en el Palacio de Salazar en Santa Cruz de La Palma que lleva por titulo: El Universo Caliente y Exotico Visto en Rayos X, a cargo del cientifico titular del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Martin Guerrero Roncel.
The GLAS laser beam produces a bright star-like beacon at an elevation of some 15 kilometres above the observatory. This beacon is used to sense the wavefront distortions due to the atmosphere that are subsequently corrected by the Adaptive Optics system. Full operation of the GLAS laser and the NAOMI Adaptive Optics system is anticipated for fall of 2007.
A deep infrared survey of the young sigma Orionis open cluster using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope has revealed that brown dwarfs and isolated planetary-mass objects
may share the same origin.
This new image of the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237) is thought to be the most-detailed ever produced. Compiled from data taken from the Isaac Newton Telescope Photometric Hydrogen-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS), the image spans four square degrees, about twenty times the size of the full moon.
Using data from the Isaac Newton Telescope
Photometric Hydrogen-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS), astronomers have found evidence that giant whirlpools form
in the wake of stars as they move through clouds in interstellar space.
Astronomers have seen an asteroid change the rate at which it spins for the first time, and shown that it is due to the YORP theoretical effect predicted but never before seen.
This brief paper summarizes INGs position and its view of how it expects to continue to deliver a high-quality service to the astronomical community from one of the best observing sites in the world
This is an announcement of opportunity for observing time on all night-timetelescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos and Teide Observatories in theCanary Islands, under the auspices of the International ScientificCommittee.
The ESO Council has just appointed Tim de Zeeuw as the next Director General of ESO, effective as of 1 September 2007.
Professor de Zeeuw occupied the chair of the ING Board from 1999 to 2002 and he was also responsible for the development of SAURON for the William Herschel Telescope.
A long-standing and unverified prediction of binary star evolution theory is the existence of a population of white dwarfs accreting from substellar donor stars. Such systems ought to be common, but the difficulty of finding them, combined with the challenge of detecting the donor against the light from accretion, means that no donor star to date has a measured mass below the hydrogen burning limit. Now astronomers using ULTRACAM on the William Herschel Telescope claim the first detection.
After more than two decades of intensive work, understanding the complex shapes of planetary nebulae and their implication on stellar evolution in general, is still a challenging and exciting goal. This is the fourth meeting of the APN conferences series devoted to this astrophysical problem. It will be held from June 18 to 22, 2007, on La Palma in the Canary Islands (Spain).
A long debated issue concerning the nucleosynthesis of neutron-rich elements in Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars is the identification of the neutron source.
Recently, a team of astronomers using UES spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope has detected rubidium from the overproduction of the long-lived radioactive isotope 87Rb in intermediate-mass AGB stars in our Galaxy.
This represents a direct observational evidence, predicted theoretically 40 years ago, of the slow-neutron capture process following the 22Ne(α,n)25Mg
reaction.
A search for low-mass brown dwarfs in the Pleiades open cluster has led to the identification of the least massive cluster members: BRB 28 and 29 have masses of the order of 25 Jupiter masses
Aldo Fiorenzano (TNG) will give a seminar on "The search for extrasolar planets: Study of line bisectors and its relation with precise radial velocity measurements", at the 6th floor meeting room of Mayantigo Building (sea-level office) at 12:00am on the 6th of September. They have prepared a suitable software in order to use the same spectra acquired for radial velocity determinations (i.e., with the spectrum of the Iodine cell imprinted on) to measure variations of the stellar line profiles. This is a novel approach, that can be of general utility in all high precision radial velocity surveys based on iodine cell data. This software has then been extensively used on data acquired within our survey (at TNG), allowing a proper insight into a number of interesting cases, where spurious estimates of the radial velocities due to activity or contamination by light from the companions were revealed. The same technique can also be considered to correct the measured radial velocities, in order to search for p
Announcement of opportunity for observing time on the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma, in semester 2007A: February 1, 2007-July 31, 2007. Further details of the proposal submission process and current instrumentation at ING.
On 2 April 2006 a new nova was reported in Cygnus (IAUC No. 8697).
This is now named V2362 Cygnus, and it reached a peak magnitude of 8 on 6 April 2006. IPHAS observations of this same part of the sky were obtained on 3 August 2004, and have now been found to include a (rare) detection of the nova progenitor at r = 20.30(+/-0.05). This valuable result has been reported as ATEL No. 795.
Con motivo de la celebracion del Congreso Internacional de Astrofisica que se celebra en Los Cancajos, el proximo viernes 19 de mayo a las 20:00 horas tendra lugar una conferencia publica en el Palacio de Salazar de Santa Cruz de La Palma que lleva por titulo Plutones y Carontes en el Cinturon Transneptuniano: es Pluton el noveno planeta? a cargo del astrofisico Javier Licandro.
Manana miercoles 17 de mayo a las 10:45 de la manana tendra lugar una rueda de prensa en el Salon Teneguia del Hotel H10 Taburiente Playa de Los Cancajos para presentar el congreso internacional de astrofisica The Nature of V838 Mon and Its Light Echo (La Naturaleza de V838 Mon y su Eco de Luz) que se celebra esta semana en el mismo hotel.
Kim Nilsson (ESO) will give a seminar on "High redshift Ly-alpha emitters in the GOODS-S field" at the next 6th floor meeting room, sea-level office, at 4:00 p.m. next 27th of April (Thursday).
ING Technical Note No. 131: Conversion of ING Cameras to SDSU Generation 3 Controllers describes the changes required in the conversion of a camera to Gen III.
This session is a question-and-answer mini-workshop aimed at providing
the La Palma user community with a forum to discuss current and future
developments on the island. It will be structured around a small
number of presentations by ING staff summarizing current activities and
forthcoming developments. Those interested in making a short
presentation, either formal or informal, should contact the session chair, to whom
suggestions for discussion points should also be addressed. The
preliminary agenda includes a short review of ING, its instrumentation and
operational plans, concentrating in particular on its AO/laser guide star
project. In addition there will be a special contribution on the 10m GTC which
will be offered to the UK community through the auspices of ESO,
discussing how science time will be offered to ESO countries.
Brown dwarfs are the bridge between the least massive stars and Jovianplanets. More than ten years after the discovery, the formationmechanism of brown dwarfs and isolated planetary-mass objects is notcompletely understood. In this talk, I will give a summary on theproperties of the substellar objects and show several scientificoutcomes from my PhD research.
Early in the morning of February the 6th, 2006 a GRB was detected by the Swift satellite.Within 15 minutes the NOT was pointed towards this burst by the Danish GRB follow-up group. Using ALFOSC a bright optical afterglow was discovered in the R band. Directly after the detection had been made, a low-resolution spectrum was acquired using the same instrument. The latter spectrum rapidly determined the redshift of GRB 060206 at z=4.048. Meanwhile, the WHT had been alerted through our collaboration of the NOT and WHT, involving GRB follow-up teams from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Denmark. Starting at just 1.6 hours after the burst a medium-resolution spectrum could be obtained using WHTs ISIS spectrograph. The combination of the NOT and WHT provides a unique window on this afterglow.
Enormous progress has been made in inflationary cosmology in the pastfew years and this seminar is to provide historical and modernoverview of the subject.
The structural properties and the fundamental scaling relations of cluster dwarf elliptical (and dS0) galaxies will be reviewed, based on the NIR (H-band, 1.65 micron) surface photometry observations in nearby clusters of galaxies (Virgo and Centaurus in particular) collected by the author and G. Gavazzi in the framework of the GOLDMiNe survey.
Earlier this year a questionnaire was issued to our community of telescope users with a number of questions regarding the current and future use of the ING telescopes.Here we present the results.
The ING Newsletter is published twice a year and it contains scientific news from the data acquired with the ING
telescopes, information on developments of the ING telescopes and instrumentation, telescope time allocations and
useful information on how to apply and other news.
Jochen Heidt from Landessternwarte Heidelberg will give the seminar entitled The QSO HE1013-2136 (z=0.785): tracing the ULIRG - QSO connection towards large look-back times?at the meeting room on the 6th floor of the sea-level base at 16:00pm on 24th January (Tuesday), 2006.
Visible and near-infrared spectroscopic observations carried out on August 1st 2005 by a group led by the ING-IAC astronomer Javier Licandro using the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) and the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) simultaneously show that the recently discovered trans-neptunian object (TNO) 2005 FY9 is very similar to Pluto. Results have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (Licandro et al., 2006, A&A,445, 35L).
The destiny of planetary systems through the late evolution of their host stars is very uncertain. Recently a team of astronomers from the University of Warwick using both the William Herschel Telescope and the Isaac Newton Telescope found a metal-rich gas disk around a moderately hot and young white dwarf.
14 October 2005. Specialist Discussion Meeting on Science from La Palma - Looking beyond 2009, at Burlington House, London, organised by the Royal Astronomical Society and ING.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have proven to be excellent probes of the distant Universe. The high luminosities of GRB afterglows allow absorption line studies of the interstellar medium at high redshift to at least z=4.5. Deep observations of afterglow positions have detected host galaxies in almost all cases. Most hosts are compact, low-metallicity, actively star-forming galaxies and are found to have low intrinsic extinction. However, in a few cases, radio/submillimeter observations of hosts give a star-formation rate which is of order a few to ~100 larger than rates derived from optical estimators.
Visiting committee of the international review panel 18-19 July, 2005
Scientific news DEEP IMPACT AT ING ! 4 July 2005 WHT+INT (LIRIS,WFC,NAOMI+INGRID)
When comet Tempel 1 came into view from La Palma, some 16 hours after the NASA Deep Impact probe struck the comet, members of the La Palma Deep Impact Collaborating Observers team were able to start tracking the target comet with the 2.5m Isaac Newtow Telescope.
El Grupo de Telescopios Isaac Newton celebra un congreso del 9 al 11 de mayo en el Hotel H10 Taburiente Playa de Los Cancajos que reune en La Palma a mas de 60 astrofisicos de todo el mundo para discutir los ultimos avances y las perspectivas futuras de una puntera y novedosa tecnica de observacion astronomica que se encuentra en desarrollo en el telescopio William Herschel del Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos.
The spectrum of SN 2004ao shows a set of broad emission bands superimposed on a quite flat continium, indicating that the supernova was close to reach the nebular phase at the date of the observations.
ING supports the Sociedad de Estudios Generales de la isla de La Palma, a society to promote general research on La Palma and communication between local investigators.
El miercoles 28 de mayo a las 20:00 horas en el Real Club Nautico de Santa Cruz de La Palma (sede de la Calle Real), el Doctor Manuel Vazquez Abeledo, investigador del Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, impartira la conferencia divulgativa Vida inteligente en el Universo. Tratara sobre las ultimas noticias en torno a la existencia y busqueda de otras civilizaciones en nuestro Universo, uno de los temas de mayor interes en la astrofisica actual. La entrada sera libre.
An astronomer from the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes has obtained spectacular images of the star V838 Monocerotis which became the brightest in our Galaxy when it exploded in January 2002. One of the images will be highlighted on the front cover of the journal Nature on 27 March 2003 and in a research paper published in the same issue.
An international team of astronomers using the Utrecht Echelle Spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope has identified the bright star Rho Cassiopeiae as the best candidate to undergo a supernova explosion in the near future. The results of this investigation are to be published in a research paper in The Astrophysical Journal on February 1.
The Near Earth Asteroid 2002 NY40 was observed with the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, on the night of August 17 to 18, 2002. The asteroid was imaged just before its closest approach to Earth, using the Adaptive Optics system NAOMI. These are the first images of a Near Earth Asteroid obtained with an Adaptive Optics system.
Manana viernes 31 de mayo a las 20:00 horas en el Palacio de Salazar de Santa Cruz de La Palma el Doctor Antonio Mampaso, investigador del Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, impartira una interesante charla divulgativa que lleva por titulo Por que todo es simetrico?. El Doctor Mampaso nos ensenara que los objetos simetricos son muy comunes en la vida ordinaria pero que, sin embargo, nuestro Universo se encuentra en la frontera entre la simetria y la no-simetria, entre el orden y el desorden. La entrada esta abierta al publico en general.
Desde el 27 hasta el 31 de mayo tendra lugar en el hotel H10 Taburiente Playa de Los Cancajos, La Palma el congreso internacional de astrofisica Symbiotic Stars Probing Stellar Evolution (las estrellas simbioticas como pruebas de la evolucion estelar). En este congreso, al que asistiran mas de 100 astrofisicos de todo el mundo, se presentaran los ultimos resultados sobre la formacion y la evolucion de las estrellas simbioticas, sistemas estelares formados por dos estrellas que conviven afectando mutuamente su evolucion.
On 23rd November, five students, two staff, and three support staff, from the Thomas Hardye School, Dorchester travelled to the island of La Palma, in the Canaries, as the start of their Field Trip to the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in the European Northern Observatory. The five students were Daniel Heanes, Ben Cowsill, Richard Mott, Howard Williams, Year 13, and William Hollins, Year 12. The staff from Thomas Hardye School were Mrs L. Harwood, and Mrs J. Harley. Support astronomers Mr David Strange and Mr Bob Mizon accompanied the party, as did Mr Alan Harwood.
A totally new type of optical detector has been used on the William Herschel Telescope to directly measure intensity and colour changes in a faint, rapidly variable binary star system, UZ Fornacis, for the first time. A team from the Space Science Department of the European Space Agencys Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands (ESA/ESTEC), who have developed the S-Cam camera, were joined by astronomers from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) in the UK to exploit this advanced instrument.
7-11 May 2001. First scientific conference organised by ING: The central kiloparsec of startbursts and active galactic nuclei: The La Palma connection.
Desde el dia 7 hasta el dia 11 de mayo tendra lugar en Los Cancajos (La Palma) un congreso internacional de astrofisica al que asistiran mas de 120 astronomos de todo el mundo. El congreso ha sido organizado por el Grupo de Telescopios Isaac Newton en colaboracion con el Excmo. Cabildo Insular y el Patronato de Turismo de La Palma.
Astronomers from all over the world will be meeting on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain from 7 to 11 May to attend an international conference on the central kiloparsecs of nearby active galaxies. This conference will review recent progress and discuss the future strategies on this very active research field.
Continuous monitoring of Comet LINEAR by the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope showed that it was disintegrating as it approached the Sun. The latest and best images from the larger aperture Isaac Newton Telescope now give us the clearest idea so far of how and why the comet disintegrated.
Nightly observations made since July 23 in different broadband filters with the 1-m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain show what appears to be the complete disruption of the nucleus of comet LINEAR, the brightest comet of the year.
The Isaac Newton Group Red Imaging Device (INGRID) saw its first light on the William Herschel Telescope on March 16. INGRID provides astronomers with the opportunity to make large field of view, deep near-infrared observations of the universe, as demonstrated by the images achieved on the first night of scientific use.
Un equipo de astronomos britanicos, utilizando el telescopio William Herschel y tecnicas de computacion avanzadas, ha observado por primera vez de forma directa un planeta fuera del Sistema Solar. El hallazgo del planeta Milenio, como asi lo han bautizado sus descubridores, se publica hoy en la prestigiosa revista cientifica Nature.
Astronomers using the Isaac Newton Telescope report in a research paper published in the December issue of the Astronomical Journal the discovery of a new Local Group galaxy, never catalogued before, in the constellation Cetus. The Cetus dwarf galaxy, as it is called, is a very intriguing object. At a distance of 800 kiloparsec, it is only 1-2 kiloparsecs in diameter and it contains only a million or so stars, placing it firmly at the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function.
From 7th to 9th April a workshop dedicated to instrumentation at the ING will take place at Halifax Hall of Residence, The University of Sheffield, UK. The new decade brings into routine operation a number of larger than 8-m telescopes. The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes must adapt to these new parameters, and present a viable future instrumentational and operational development route to maximise its future effectiveness and relevance to the astronomical communities needs.
Desde el dia 5 de Abril el Grupo de Telescopios Isaac Newton acoge, por primera vez, a cuatro estudiantes palmeros en practicas procedentes del Instituto de Educacion Secundaria de San Andres y Sauces.
An international team of astronomers led by Prof. Jan van Paradijs, University of Amsterdam has recently completed the first phase of a multi-year project to survey the sky to very faint limits using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands.
A totally new concept in optical detector instrumentation has made its first appearance at the William Herschel Telescope on 2 February 1999. The Superconducting Tunnel Junction Camera (S-CAM), designed and built by members of the Astrophysics Division of the European Space Agency, consists of a photon counting system which provides position and arrival time of each detected photon, along with the photon energy for the first time in history of optical astronomy.
Today the UK Daily Telegraph newspaper has reported that a team of astronomers led by Hans Deeg from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias has discovered evidence for a planet like ours with an orbit that allows the existence of life. Their observations were carried out at the Isaac Newton and Jacobus Kapteyn Telescopes, among others, and their findings have been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics on 10 October.
The brightest object yet observed in the Universe, APM08279+5255, has been discovered by an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and his colleagues using the ING telescopes Isaac Newton and Jacobus Kapteyn. Their findings have been published today in the Astrophysical Journal.
El Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos se complace en invitar a todos los habitantes de La Palma a visitar sus instalaciones los dias 26 de julio, 30 de agosto y 13 de septiembre mediante la organizacion de las ya tradicionales Puertas Abiertas.
El Grupo de Telescopios Isaac Newton (ING) de La Palma ha puesto en marcha una lista de correo electronico dedicada a la difusion de todo tipo de informaciones sobre nuestra isla. Con esta iniciativa el ING desea que los palmeros con acceso a InterNet puedan aprovechar mejor las posibilidades de comunicacion que ofrecen las nuevas tecnologias.
Al comienzo de esta semana la Universidad de Wyoming en Laramie (USA) ha dado a conocer mediante una nota de prensa el descubrimiento de un nuevo tipo de estrella gracias a las observaciones llevadas a cabo principalmente con el telescopio William Herschel del Grupo Isaac Newton. Este descubrimiento fue publicado por algunos medios de comunicacion nacionales el pasado martes.
Los dias 29 y 30 de octubre tendra lugar el congreso internacional Site Properties of the Canarian Observatories (Calidad de los Observatorios Canarios) en el Hotel Taburiente Playa de los Cancajos en La Palma. Este congreso esta organizado por el Subcomite de Site Properties (SUCOSIP) del Comite Cientifico Internacional (CCI) de los observatorios canarios.
El Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), el Grupo de Telescopios Isaac Newton (ING) y el Experimento HEGRA desean expresar su mas sincero agradecimiento a todos los que nos visitaron durante las Jornadas de Puertas Abiertas que se llevaron a cabo los dias 25 de julio, 10 de agosto y 14 de septiembre. Asimismo, ha sido para nosotros una enorme alegria y satisfaccion haber atendido a todos y ya estamos pensando en las Jornadas del proximo verano.
El Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos se complace en invitar a todos los habitantes de La Palma a visitar sus instalaciones los dias 25 de julio, 10 de agosto y 14 de septiembre. Para todo el personal del Observatorio es una enorme alegria poder ensenarles nuestras instalaciones y por eso un ano mas ha puesto toda su ilusion en las Jornadas de Puertas Abiertas.
Observations carried out in the past few days to study the distribution of sodium atoms in Comet Hale-Bopp have led to the discovery of a new type of comet tail. Sodium atoms have previously been seen near the centers of other comets, but these observations reveal for the first time in Hale-Bopp a straight tail of sodium atoms 6 degrees long.
One of the big unresolved mysteries in the Universe is the origin of the enigmatic gamma-ray bursts (GRB), intense bursts of the highest energy radiation that have been detected by gamma-ray telescopes in space. Until recently these bursts were never seen in the visible light, which hampered further progress in finding an explanation for the GRBs for more than two decades. This situation changed dramatically on February 28.
The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) is showing the rest of the world pictures of the Hale-Bopp, through Internet, which are updated on a daily basis. These pictures are being taken mainly by the CoCam (Comet Camera), the wide field CCD imaging facility of the ING. By doing this, ING hopes nobody will miss the spectacle of the Hale-Bopp. It will also allow everyone to follow its evolutions during the days of its brightest visibility.
The Hale-Bopp comet has caused great interest within the media and the general public. The purpose of this information sheet is to give basic information about the comet and to help journalists with their work.
