Nearly a century after dark matter was first proposed to explain the motion of galaxy clusters, physicists still have no idea what it’s made of. Researchers around the world have built dozens of detectors in hopes of discovering dark matter. As a graduate student, I helped design and operate one of these detectors, aptly named […]
Astrophysics • Cosmology • DIPC Astrophysics • DIPC Computational Cosmology
The Javalambre-Photometric Local Universe Survey, J-PLUS, is an unprecedented photometric sky survey of 8500 deg 2 visible from Javalambre (Aragón, Spain), using a set of 12 broad, intermediate and narrow-band filters. The J-PLUS photometric system is well suited to study the properties of nearby galaxies (z < 0.015). However, there are a few redshift windows […]
Everything is connected. Are you familiar with the butterfly effect? According to this idea small changes could have dramatic consequences. Well, I have been thinking about this lately as one question was forming in my mind: Could it be that the ultimate answer to why I am writing this blog post is intimately related to […]
A star cluster is a group of stars that are sufficiently close to each other for them to be physically associated. Stars belonging to the cluster are formed together from the same cloud of interstellar gas and have approximately the same age and initial chemical composition. Because of this, and sin the stars in a […]
There is a variety of predictions from the general theory of relativity. And usually they are treated in the popular imagination somehow independently. This would be the case of gravitational waves and gravitational lenses, but in reality nothing prevent them to combine, even at a ‘micro’ level. A gravitational lens is any object that deflects […]
A group of astrophysicists (to which I have the pleasure to belong to), led by scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Spain), have recently published an article in Nature Astronomy in which the early events shaping the current view of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, have been unveiled . Such discovery has […]
Black holes are vacuum solutions of the Einstein equation. Hence, the energy-momentum tensor for a black hole is null at every point of space. The only place where its mass can be located is where there is no space, i.e., at the singularity. Hence, for a Schwarzschild black hole, the mass is located at the […]
I remember very well my physics professor during my first year at university. She stressed the importance of having clear intuitions of what physical terms mean before any mathematics was invoked. ‘Imagine someone drops an 100-gram apple 1 metre above your head’, she would say; ‘the pain you feel is the equivalent of a joule […]
Astrophysicists from Yale University have recently claimed the discovery of a galaxy lacking dark matter . But, to fully understand (and assess) the excitement produced by this paper, let’s review a couple of things regarding dark matter and galaxies. In the current lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) paradigm, the most accepted “theory to model the Universe […]
It is commonly said that Astronomy is an observational science. We cannot create and study stars or galaxies in our laboratories and, thus all the information we have from the Universe comes from observations. However, there is another approach: simulations. Astronomers use complex algorithms and computational techniques, in combination with the laws of physics, to […]