Imagine you are enjoying a peaceful summer evening at the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Not far from you, some kids are piling up sand with a shovel. They do not care about the shape the pile is taking, so one would expect just an amorphous pile of sand. To your astonishment, that is not […]
When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the “darkest” objects in the cosmos, as not even light can escape their incredibly strong gravity. Because of this, it’s impossible to directly image black holes, making them mysterious and quite perplexing […]
Euclid is an ESA mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up most of the energy budget of the cosmos. The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic structures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters […]
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 […]