Progress on KMOS
Black hole mass of Cen-A
A strongly lensed sub-millimetre galaxy
The Messenger
No. 139 – March 2010
Telescopes and Instrumentation
Jim Emerson1
Credit: S. Beard
Will Sutherland1
1
stronomy Unit, Queen Mary University
A
of London, United Kingdom
Introduction
To start with, construction went smoothly, is highly aspheric, with departures from settings. It soon became apparent that
and the enclosure was ready for the the best-fit sphere of around 0.8 mm; the system showed some trefoil (a third
telescope structure, which was installed this means that small polishing tools were order optical aberration). It was suspected
during 2006. In early 2007, we had a needed, different for different zones on that this was associated with the M2
run with dummy masses in place of the the mirror, which increases the polishing axial definers, and this was confirmed by
mirrors, and a small 20-cm telescope time. This was a known difficulty from mounting the M2 and its cell rotated
mounted on the Cassegrain rotator, look- early on, but it appears that the time by 180 degrees, which changed the sign
ing up through a hole in the top-end scales were underestimated by the man- of the trefoil. Then, the M2 manufacturers
structure (designed for this reason). This ufacturer. The lateness was especially came to Chile, disassembled and in
run was useful to debug the telescope frustrating as the very first thing the VISTA spected the M2 cell. They found nothing
software, build a preliminary pointing project did after securing funding was wrong, and it was carefully reassembled,
model, and showed that the basic track- to purchase the M1 blank in 2001 and the in parallel with VISTA’s camera being
ing and slewing performance were good. shaping of the blank was complete by mounted in place of the test camera (see
April 2003, so it was highly regrettable Figure 4). It was expected that the active
Shortly afterwards, the secondary mir- that completion of M1 took so long, and support forces on M1 would be able
ror (M2) arrived and was successfully that the manufacturer’s polishing time esti- to compensate for the effect of the trefoil
coated in protected silver. VISTA’s cam- mates only converged to the actual time on M2, and this indeed proved to be
era was flown to Chile in January 2007 so very near to the end. However, the the case. It is still unclear how this trefoil
and checked out for performance on site, quality of polishing finally achieved was arose. Measurements at the factory
using a small “spot projector” mounted high. To claw back some time, the M1 showed trefoil was not present there,
in front of the window. There had been was not shipped by sea, but instead was when tested with similar support forces
no damage in transport, and the process flown from Moscow to Antofagasta in to those when mounted on the telescope.
of mounting the camera onto the tele- an Antonov transport plane, arriving at It is not possible to rotate M2 relative
scope was subsequently tried out suc- VISTA during Easter 2008. to its cell to see if the trefoil is due to the
cessfully (see Figure 1). Figure 2 shows cell or the mirror itself. As the system
the back view of VISTA, with the camera The coating plant provided with VISTA image quality now comfortably meets its
and its electronics boxes mounted on then produced a very high quality and specification of 50 % encircled energy
the Cassegrain rotator. stable coating in protected silver (see diameter of 0.51 arcseconds, the trefoil
Figure 3), enhancing VISTA’s sensitivity has been accepted, though it would be
compared to a conventional aluminium good to understand its origin and then
Primary mirror (M1) polishing coating. hopefully get rid of it at source, rather than
correcting with M1 forces.
So far so good! However the time taken
to complete the polishing of M1 then Camera on sky The camera first observed the sky on
prevented VISTA being delivered on the 23 June 2008 with the auxiliary CCDs
timescale expected at that time. This As soon as the M1 mirror had been (for autoguiding and wavefront sensing),
4.1-metre f/1 mirror is the most highly coated it was installed in the telescope, and with the IR detectors on 24 June.
curved large mirror ever polished and this and a test camera containing a Shack– The first images were recognisable with
task proved to take much longer than Hartmann system was used to set up the expected setup parameters, and
anticipated. The fast mirror means that it an initial pointing model and active optics the image quality was improved over the
s ubsequent nights with various adjust- and required a 1.3-mm lateral movement The filter wheel has worked well ever
ments to the many M1 and M2 positions of M1 to align it to the Cassegrain axis; since.
and forces. The pointing and tracking this should have been simple, but in prac-
was good. Figure 4 shows VISTA from the tice there was not quite enough clear- Unfortunately soon after this, one of the
front with all components present and ance in the M1 axial definers, thus requir- three closed-cycle coolers on the camera
working. No mechanical adjustments ing removal of the M1 to adjust the three had a major breakdown; the required
were needed to the camera, a tribute to axial definers. There was considerable spare parts turned out to be very similar,
the engineering done by the camera worry here about whether the calculated but not quite identical, to those held in
team led by the Science and Technology sign was correct, and fortunately it was. the Paranal stores; hence getting these
Facilities Council (STFC) run Rutherford The small camera focus gradient is still parts from Europe caused another minor
Appleton Laboratory. present at the time of writing, but is soon delay.
to be eliminated with a new shim between
The camera background was checked the camera and Cassegrain rotator. The
and the non-linearity of the detectors co-planarity of the 16 detectors appears Azimuth and M2 support oscillations
measured robustly. At this stage, image to be excellent, so once M1 and the cam-
data was not being archived by ESO, era are one-off aligned to the Cassegrain An annoying problem was that, under
so it was written to 250 GB USB disks rotator axis, the active optics system certain reproducible conditions (where the
which were taken back to the UK in hand automatically keeps M2 collimated, giving azimuth axis was moving very slowly),
baggage for analysis in the UK. There good images across the entire field. the azimuth drive servo loop went into
were occasional problems with the IRACE oscillation, exciting an 11.6-Hz resonance
number-cruncher workstations over in the telescope structure and turning
heating causing data outage; once traced, Filter wheel the images into “sticks”. This was fixed by
this was simple to solve. installing an electronic notch filter in
At first, changing the filters was very reli the servo, after which there were no more
able, but by October 2008 it was noticed azimuth oscillations.
Active optics that the 1.37-metre diameter filter wheel
(the only moving part inside the cold Another problem was intermittent small
Over the following months the active camera) occasionally failed to reach its (~ 1/2 arcsecond) ~ 2 Hz oscillations
optics corrections for achieving the best demand position. Many experiments of the hexapod which controls the posi-
image quality were all generated for were done looking at the software and tion of the secondary mirror, which
various azimuths, altitudes and tempera- electronics, but the intermittent problem was small enough to go unnoticed until
tures, and the autoguiding and wave- gradually became more and more fre- the focus gradients were sorted out.
front sensing software was stress-tested quent. By February 2009 there was This was affecting one-third to half of the
and made more robust. This was quite nothing for it but to take the camera off, data taken, and making it very hard to
a lengthy process, since there are numer- warm it up, open up the cryostat and demonstrate the intrinsic image quality of
ous correction terms, and the many look at the parts. Surprisingly it was found the system. After considerable analysis
Zernike polynomials and mirror modes are that a jacking screw (used for assembly and experimentation, in August 2009 new
measured in detector coordinates, but and disassembly) had worked loose and servo parameters were identified and
require de-rotating into telescope coordi had unscrewed itself enough to foul the these oscillations ceased. After this, it was
nates to apply corrections to M2 posi- filter wheel, scraping off a ring of paint possible to reliably achieve the required
tion and M1 forces; thus, getting all the and some metal swarf. There were flakes image quality of the final system, and
signs and phases right was quite time- of paint all over the filters themselves, to demonstrate that the 50 % encircled
consuming. Also, there were some com- explaining why the flat fields had been energy distribution was comfortably
plications: we found a small astigmatism becoming unexpectedly variable. The fil- within the 0.51-arcsecond specification.
co-rotating with the camera, possibly ter trays were removed and the filters
due to a thermal gradient; this was fixed cleaned, the debris was cleaned out of
in software by adding an M1 active force the rest of the camera, and the offending The future
pattern that co-rotates with the camera. jacking screw removed. No damage to
the filters or detectors resulted, and the The above is only a selection of (perhaps)
Focus gradients across the very large motor drive also proved resilient. The interesting points, and a fuller descrip-
detector plane were also complicated, and opportunity was taken to change the tion of commissioning will be presented
we eventually decomposed these into order of the filters in the wheel to a more at the 2010 SPIE meeting in San Diego.
three problems: one was a subtle soft- efficient one for the selected ESO Public Much software-related work was also
ware error (dependent on radial position Surveys, and to fill the one remaining done, both to improve the system, and
of the wavefront sensor stars), another empty filter tray with two paired half-sets to ensure that the observing overheads
was a real focus gradient “fixed to the tel- of narrowband filters at 975 and 985 nm were minimised.
escope”, and thirdly a smaller focus gra- which were available. After the camera
dient “fixed to the camera”. The gradient was pumped and cooled down again, VISTA is now working very well, pro
“fixed to the telescope” was quite large, VISTA was back on sky in March 2009. ducing images with the depth and quality
expected, with minor improvements being Acknowledgements provided invaluable assistance in assessing the
image data acquired during commissioning.
worked on to further enhance its relia
The VISTA Project Office at STFC’s UK Astronomy
bility. The VISTA ZJKs 1 × 1.5 degree Technology Centre managed the integration and
image of the Orion Nebula in Figure 5, of commissioning of VISTA and skillfully coordinated References
which the front cover image is a only the work of all those individuals and organisations
involved. The Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit Arnaboldi, M. et al. 2007, The Messenger, 127, 28
a small part, indicates how impressive its
(CASU), part of the UK’s VISTA Data Flow System, Emerson, J. et al. 2004, The Messenger, 117, 27
wide-field views are. Emerson, J. et al. 2006, The Messenger, 126, 41
Magda Arnaboldi1 and the reduced images and catalogues of the integrated system, tools and inter-
Monika Petr-Gotzens1 will soon be available, enabling the first faces across departments, in a “survey-
Marina Rejkuba1 exciting science with VISTA. like” operation mode for the first time, and
Mark Neeser1 proves that ESO has a robust system in
Thomas Szeifert1 place.
Valentin D. Ivanov1 Introduction
Wolfgang Hummel1
Michael Hilker1 In the Commissioning–Science Verifi The VISTA SV projects — the Galactic
Nadine Neumayer1 cation–Paranalisation cycle of VLT instru- and extragalactic mini-surveys
Palle Møller1 ments, Science Verification is typically
Kim Nilsson1 executed five to two months prior to the SV consists of the execution of two self-
Bram Venemans1 start of operations of a given VLT instru- contained mini-surveys, one Galactic and
Evanthia Hatziminaoglou1 ment. In the case of VISTA and its cam- one extragalactic, which were defined
Gaitee Hussain1 era VIRCAM (Emerson et al., 2004), its by teams of astronomers from ESO and
Thomas Stanke1 start of operation is equivalent to the start the community. The execution of two
Paula Teixeira1 of operation of an entire new telescope, mini-surveys in a single time allocation of
Suzanne Ramsay1 a new instrument and a new schema for two weeks allowed ESO to optimise
Jörg Retzlaff1 operations (Sciops 2.0). For ESO service the survey operations procedures, expe-
Remco Slijkhuis1 mode operations, the execution of the rience the full end-to-end process of
Fernando Comerón1 VISTA public surveys represents a chal- survey data, and fulfill the goals of the sci-
Jorge Melnick1 lenge, since they require the definition ence verification policy by providing the
Martino Romaniello1 of several thousands of observing blocks community with a complete and scientifi-
Jim Emerson 2 (OBs) that need to be managed, sched- cally exciting set of new data.
Will Sutherland2 uled and executed in the most efficient
Mike Irwin 3 way. The service mode operations for The VISTA SV Galactic and extragalactic
Jim Lewis 3 public surveys use a new version of the science cases are briefly described.
Simon Hodgkin 3 Phase 2 Proposal Preparation tool (P2PP)
Eduardo Gonzales-Solares 3 and a new Observing Tool (OT); see
Arnaboldi et al. (2008). The creation of The Galactic survey project — Orion
OBs for public surveys also requires
1
ESO a new tool called SADT (Survey Area Def- Participants:
2
ISTA Consortium, Queen Mary Univer-
V inition Tool) for the definition of the sur- – ESO: Fernando Comerón, Gaitee
sity of London, United Kingdom vey geometry, e.g., filled field positions (or Hussain, Monika Petr-Gotzens,
3
Cambridge Astronomical Surveys Unit tiles) at a given position on the sky or Suzanne Ramsay, Thomas Stanke,
(CASU), University of Cambridge, United large areas of several degrees, and the Paula Teixeira
Kingdom sequence of “pawprint” offsets required – E xternal: Juan M. Alcalá, Cesar
for the homogeneous coverage of the Briceño, Mark McCaughrean, Joana
VISTA camera focal plane (the 16 detec- Oliveira, Loredana Spezzi, Elaine
The Visible and Infrared Survey Tele- tors in the VIRCAM focal plane are non- Winston, Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio,
scope for Astronomy (VISTA) will contiguous, see Figure 4 of Emerson et Hans Zinnecker
be mostly dedicated to the execution al., 2004), and for finding the necessary – QMUL/VISTA/CASU: Jim Emerson,
of ESO public surveys, requiring large guide and active optics stars for each Will Sutherland, Mike Irwin,
amounts of service observing time. pawprint. In addition, VISTA has a differ- Jim Lewis, Simon Hodgkin, Eduardo
VISTA Science Verification (SV) thus ent dataflow and quality control (QC) with Gonzalez-Solares
differs from that usually implemented respect to the other VLT instruments.
for other VLT instruments. VISTA SV Finally VISTA and its camera VIRCAM are The Orion star-forming region had been
consisted of two self-contained mini- expected to produce an order of mag identified as an ideal VISTA SV target
surveys: a Galactic mini-survey in the nitude more data than all the other VLT to study several aspects of star formation,
region around the Orion Belt stars; instruments combined. early stellar evolution, and the interplay
and a deep extragalactic mini-survey between OB stars and their immediate
of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 253. The VISTA SV was therefore a funda environment. In particular, an area of ap
ESO astronomers used these mini-sur- mental part of the procedure for verifica- proximately 30 square degrees in the
veys as benchmarks to optimise the tion of the end-to-end system for the region of the Orion Belt, roughly centred
survey operation procedures, minimise VISTA telescope + VIRCAM camera + at RA = 05h 32m, DEC = – 00° 18;,
overheads, and experience the full Quality Control + Archive operations. was chosen for a deep VISTA survey
end-to-end process of survey data While the individual components could be making use of all VISTA broadband filters
acquisition. The raw data and associ- tested through previous verification (Z, Y, J, H, Ks). Orion is the closest
ated calibrations from both mini-sur- and commissioning activities, VISTA SV giant molecular cloud at an average dis-
veys were released in December 2009, has enabled ESO to carry out the full test tance of ~ 400 pc, and has been actively
by the mandatory use of SADT, which separation of one hour in time between Z- and J- broadbands, plus the NB118
has been specifically developed for the these two. arrowband. The deep narrowband im
n
preparation of extensive survey obser 3) To improve the sensitivity for observa- aging is required to map the opacity
vations, and by using a newly designed tions at Z- and J-band of Tile 16, which of the halo, as well as to probe the star
P2PP. contains the well- studied cluster σ Ori, formation rate at a redshift of 0.84 for Hα
some additional OBs at Z- and J-band emitting galaxies.
In detail, the following strategy and re were prepared. These observations
spective OBs were adopted: were used as fillers, i.e. were carried The target of the extragalactic mini-survey
1) Deep imaging at Z, Y, H, J, Ks for out only in case additional time was is NGC 253, a barred Sc galaxy, seen
each tile was accomplished by creat- available, e.g., a few minutes (or tens of nearly edge-on, in the Sculptor group at
ing two OBs (per tile) that were con- minutes) at the end of the observing the distance of 3.94 Mpc (Karachentsev et
catenated, i.e. enforcing their execution night when it was not reasonable to al., 2003); see the VISTA image in Fig-
in immediate consecutive order. The start deep observations on a new tile. ure 2. It is one of the best nearby exam-
first OB defined KsJZ imaging with typ- The settings used for these observa- ples of a nuclear starburst galaxy. A
ical total exposure times per pixel in tions were NDIT × DIT = 3 × 30 sec (Z), wealth of data is available in the ESO
the stacked final tile of 96 s (Ks), 8 × 4 sec (J), with three jitters per archive: narrowband Hα, and (shallower)
128 s (J), 900 s (Z) and two jitters per pawprint position. broadbands from the MPG/ESO 2.2-
pawprint position, except for Z-band metre Wide Field Imager (WFI), and imag-
observations that use three jitters. ing and spectra of the nucleus obtained
The second OB defined HYYZ imaging The extragalactic survey project – with SOFI and ISAAC. The deep image
with typical total exposure times NGC 253 of Malin & Hadley (1997), reaching
per pixel of 96 s (H), 240 s (Y ), 48 s (Y ), 28 mag arcsecond –2, shows the presence
48 s (Z). Short exposures for Y- and Participants: of an extended asymmetrical stellar halo
Z-band with shorter DITs (Detector – ESO: Valentin Ivanov, Emanuela plus a southern spur. A very small portion
Integration Times) were performed in Pompei, Steffen Mieske, Thomas of its stellar halo has been studied for
the second OB in order to have non- Szeifert (Chile), Magda Arnaboldi, distance determination, and the accurate
saturated images for the moderately Giuseppine Battaglia, Wolfram distance (D = 3.94 Mpc) to the galaxy has
bright objects. The OB execution Freudling, Eva Hatziminaoglou, Michael been determined by resolving and detect-
in concatenation took approximately 2 Hilker, Harald Kuntschner (Garching), ing the RGB tip stars at I = 23.97 ± 0.19 in
hours and was motivated by the fact Ingo Misgeld, Palle Møller, Mark the outer disc observed with the WFPC2
that young low-mass objects are known Neeser, Nadine Neumayer, Kim Nilsson, camera on board the Hubble Space Tele-
to be possibly variable on timescales Marina Rejkuba, Jörg Retzlaff, scope.
of several hours to days. Hence, an Remco Slijkhuis, Bram Venemans,
almost simultaneous observation of a Bodo Ziegler Complementary to the deep J and Z
tile in all VISTA broadband filters can – E xternal: Enrica Iodice, Laura Greggio exposures, shallow Y, J, H, Ks images
obtain the true shape of the spectral – QMUL/VISTA/CASU: Jim Emerson, of NGC 253 are also required. The primary
energy distribution of the sources. William Sutherland, Mike Irwin, goal of a shallow survey is to model the
Since most regions in the Orion survey Jim Lewis, Simon Hodgkin, Eduardo disc and bulge components of NGC 253
area do not show a strong nebulous Gonzalez-Solares and, together with the deep imaging
background and little crowding, the sky data, to detect any signatures of an ex
was estimated from the science ex The scientific project of the extragalactic tended thick disc component. With
posures of the tile itself. Tile 4, how- mini-survey investigates the mass the addition of optical data obtained from
ever, contains NGC 2024, which has assembly history of a spiral galaxy in the the WFI, along with a robust bulge plus
extended nebulosity. Therefore, for context of the cold dark matter (CDM) disc decomposition, one can estimate
this tile the sky subtraction strategy structure formation scenario. This goal is the mass via luminosity and a colour-
was to use the concatenated observa- achieved by using the abundance and based mass-to-light ratio. Both the disc
tions of Tile 4 with an offset sky field, properties of galaxy satellites, i.e. their model and the large number of observed
east of NGC 2024, and with the Tile 8 mass function and metallicities, the wavebands are also used to search
observations to the north of Tile 4. detection of the brightest stars (super- for possible substructures in the disc and
2) Shallower, repeated imaging of Tile 19, giants, Asymptotic Giant Branch [AGB] halo of NGC 253.
centred on the stellar group of 25 Ori and Red Giant Branch [RGB] stars) in the
were executed in order to search galaxy halo and in the stellar streams, A summary of the scientific projects cur-
for variability of sources. An observa- and the detection of globular clusters and rently underway with the NGC 253 data-
tion at J- and H-band (one short OB ultra-compact dwarfs in the galaxy outer set is:
with alternating H and J observations halo. This information maps the galaxy – Morphology of spiral arms and disc;
with NDIT × DIT = 3 × 4 sec (H) and assembly history, and the underlying – Nuclear young massive star clusters
2 × 8 sec (J) was executed at least once galaxy mass distribution for a nearby and OB associations;
per night. But typically, two epochs edge-on spiral galaxy. Observationally, – Streams and satellite galaxy properties;
per night were taken with a minimum this project requires deep imaging in the – Detections of globular clusters, ultra-
The following observing strategies were The definition of the geometry of the mini-
Observing strategy adopted: 5.8 hrs in NB118 (NDIT × DIT = surveys via SADT, and the Phase 2 OBs
1 × 300 sec), 9.6 hrs in Z (NDIT × DIT = are available on the VISTA SV web page1.
The geometry for the survey consisted of 3 × 60 sec) and 24 hrs in J-band (NDIT ×
a single tile rotated at position angle DIT = 5 × 45 sec) to detect the tip of
52 degrees so that the major axis of the the RGB stars. We used a sequence of VISTA SV — input requests from the PIs
galaxy was parallel to the shorter side six pawprint exposures nested within a
of the tile: the wide VISTA field-of-view and sequence of five jitter offsets. Such a On the basis of the Public Survey
the adopted orientation of the camera strategy was adopted to ensure the best Panel’s recommendation, the Principal
nvestigators (PIs) of the public surveys ters, i.e. de-striping, and the best obser- user support astronomers. The over-
were invited by the ESO Director General vational strategy for offset sky observa- heads were tested during the execution of
during the Phase 2 workshop to submit tions. At the same time important VIRCAM the SV OBs and further verification is
their OBs for targeted observations template parameters and instrument char expected during the regular service mode
(up to two hours duration) with observing acteristics were measured as described operations, with more robust statistics on
modes that were not covered by the below. a larger number of OBs.
VISTA SV observing strategies. Details of
the VISTA public surveys can be found Reductions of SV data beyond the The VIRCAM detectors were tested for
in Arnaboldi et al. (2007). Public survey pawprint level — production of tiles, mo persistence, linearity and saturation level.
PIs Minniti (VVV), Cioni (VMC), Jarvis and saics and band merging of the cata- Results based on the observations of
Dunlop (VIDEO and UltraVISTA) requested logues — are on-going activities coordi- bright stars in the Orion survey indicate
short observations during the VISTA SV nated in ESO Garching by the SV team that only a very low level of persistence is
for their dedicated tests. More informa- PIs, Arnaboldi and Petr-Gotzens, and in measured. For a star with K = 2.2 mag
tion on the observing strategies and the CASU by Irwin. (HD 36558) a persistence signal of 1.5 σ
associated data products are also availa- above the background was detected
ble on the VISTA SV web pages1. 1 minute after the saturation occurred. No
VISTA SV — feedback to science opera- persistence at all is measurable after 2
tions and user support minutes. Filters were checked for fringing
VISTA SV — visitor mode observations and none was detected. Linearity and
The observations carried out during the saturation tests were carried out during
Observations were carried out in visitor VISTA SV provided very useful tests the VISTA commissioning, and the related
mode and the observers were Arnaboldi, on the Phase 2 tools and the science op information is available from the CASU
Hilker, Petr-Gotzens and Rejkuba from eration in service mode. The results web page2.
15 October to 3 November 2009. Support of these tests and the actions taken are
astronomers were Szeifert and Ivanov. briefly described. The intensity of the sky background
A complete observing log is available from was monitored during the evening twilight.
the VISTA SV web pages1. The weather The ESO astronomers verified the con- A long sequence of observations was
conditions were good for most of the sistency between the definition of the sur- acquired in J- and Z-band for the
nights with typically clear or photometric vey geometry of executed OBs and the NGC 253 mini-survey, and the frame se
atmospheric conditions and seeing acquired frames via the astrometry cali- quence shows a strongly decreasing
≤ 1.2 arcseconds. Four nights were lost bration applied by the VIRCAM pipeline to background as a function of time from the
due to weather and technical problems. the OB data products. Important SADT evening twilight for the J-band, and
The galaxy NGC 253 was observed during input parameters, e.g., the tile overlaps, a shallower decrease in the Z-band, see
the first half of the nights at airmasses tile orientation on the sky and the combi- Figure 3.
less than 1.5. Orion was then observable nation of six pawprints into a tile, were
during the second half of the nights, after verified with the corresponding data prod-
it had risen above airmass 2.0. ucts. The new concepts of the schedul- Feedback to the VISTA Data Flow System
ing containers implemented for the first
Pawprint-level data products for about time in the P2PP version for surveys were To ensure an early feedback of the VISTA
60 % of the observations of the extra tested and executed during the VISTA SV. SV results into the Vista Data Flow Sys-
galactic mini-survey, and 10 % of the Ga OBs were defined using Time Link, Con- tem (VDFS) , a two-day meeting of the
lactic mini-survey were produced at catenation, and Group scheduling con- ESO SV team and CASU representatives
the Paranal Observatory, in parallel with tainers. The implementation at the P2PP was organised at ESO on 25–26 Novem-
the observations. The reductions were run level is working well. ber 2009. In the current setup, the
on the offline machine with the VIRCAM VISTA raw data reach CASU one week
pipeline version 0.9.6. The reduction The VIRCAM templates allow the use after they are ingested into the ESO
blocks were manually adjusted in order of multiple filters in a single OB. The nest- archive; all the data taken with VISTA are
to use the latest calibrations available, ing of different filters, different pawprint processed by CASU, and then trans-
and include the offset frames for sky sub- sequences and jittering offsets needed to ferred to the other VDFS component, the
traction. The OB-level data products be verified during SV. All available config- VISTA Science Archive (VSA) at the Wide
consist of stacked jittered images for each urations were used and most of them Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) in Edin-
pawprint, associated photometric cata- successfully executed. In the case of burgh. An important aspect of the opera-
logues, confidence maps, as well as offset problems, they were either documented tions is that the night logs are very impor-
sky images. These reductions enabled or actions taken to solve them before tant for the processing of scientific data.
the ESO astronomers involved in the user the Phase 2 call. The overheads for OB Therefore channels for the information to
support and science operations to gain execution were measured during the flow both from ESO to VDFS components
experience with the VIRCAM pipeline and ESO commissioning run in July 2009 and in the UK and vice versa need to be spe-
data processing, and to investigate some implemented as part of P2PP for the cifically established, and some areas for
validity ranges of the different parame- verification of the OBs carried out by the improvement were identified.
#4RDB
#4RDB
SŮEQNLDUDMHMFSVHKHFGSGNTQR SŮEQNLDUDMHMFSVHKHFGSGNTQR
Figure 3. Background flux vs. twilight time distance: 2MASS star catalogue to be established. the astronomical community at large
J-band (left panel) shows a rapid decrease in back-
An updated version of the VISTA pipeline with a set of VISTA data ready for scientific
ground flux within the first hour from the evening
t wilight, while the effect is smaller for Z-band (right now handles the astrometry correctly. exploitation.
panel). These measurements were made on raw JHKs photometry and zero points are
images, but in all cases DIT and NDIT values were computed for each detector by compari-
the same. References
son with 2MASS photometry for the
same stars. The Z- and J-bands can be Arnaboldi, M. et al. 2007, The Messenger, 127, 28
VIRCAM detectors have about 1–10 % calibrated from the linear relation with Arnaboldi, M. et al. 2008, The Messenger, 134, 42
deviation from linearity and saturate 2MASS J–H colour, and the independent Bally, J. 2008, in Handbook of Star Forming Regions,
at about 24 000–37 000 ADU. To ensure zero point calibration via standard fields Volume I: The Northern Sky, ed. B. Reipurth (San
Francisco, ASP Monograph Publications) 4, 459
the use of VIRCAM detectors in the line- taken during the night. Chabrier, G. et al. 2000, ApJ, 542, 464
arity regime, VISTA users are advised Emerson, J., McPherson, A. & Sutherland, W. 2004,
to adopt short integration times, e.g., The Messenger, 117, 27
DIT < 10 s for H- and Ks-bands. Science Publications of VISTA SV data and next Karachentsev, I. D. et al. 2003, A&A, 404, 93
Malin, D. & Hadley, B. 1997, PASA, 14, 52
operations in Paranal have implemented steps
a careful monitoring of flats in the dif
ferent bands taken at sunsets, as they The raw data and master calibrations Links
can easily be outside the linearity regime. of the two mini-surveys executed during 1
ISTA SV webpage: http://www.eso.org/sci/
V
the VISTA SV were published on the observing/policies/PublicSurveys/VISTA_SV.html
Both the astrometric and photometric dedicated VISTA SV pages1 and became 2
CASU webpage: http://casu.ast.cam.ac.uk/
calibration were discussed at length available worldwide on 21 December surveys-projects/vista/technical/linearity-
by the ESO and CASU astronomers. The 2009. They can be downloaded via the sequences
astrometric calibration implemented ESO archive web pages; users should
by the VISTA pipeline seems to work well be reminded of the large size of these
in the Orion fields, but had some prob- images!
lems in the case of the NGC 253 bright
disc. Since it depends on the 2MASS The VISTA SV team is also planning to
catalogue, when the reference stars are publish the data products produced
affected by spurious detections because by the VDFS pipeline and the advanced
of crowding of bright extended objects data products, e.g., complete mosaicked
in the field, the astrometric calibration pawprints into tiles and band-merged
computed by the pipeline is not correct. catalogues, as soon as these are scientif-
SV data uncovered this problem and ically validated. Access to these data
allowed more robust quality checks on the products via the ESO archive will provide
Domenico Bonaccini Calia1 and SINFONI instruments (Bonaccini et 10 : 1. These requirements on the laser
Yan Feng1 al., 2003), and in 2013 the installation and the launch equipment are stringent.
Wolfgang Hackenberg1 of a further four LGS is planned as part For routine operation at astronomical
Ronald Holzlöhner1 of the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF; observatories, the laser should also be
Luke Taylor1 Arsenault et al., 2006) project. Future ex rugged, turn-key, remotely operated
Steffan Lewis1 tremely large telescopes such as the from the control room, and require little
European Extremely Large Telescope maintenance. These laser characteristics
(E-ELT) will also require multiple laser have been specified for the AOF, but
1
ESO guide stars (currently 6–8 are envisaged), they are also relevant to the E-ELT base-
and it is essential to provide reliable, line requirements. It must be mentioned
compact, low-maintenance laser sources that special formats of pulsed lasers
A breakthrough in the development at a reasonable cost to meet the needs of may become useful in the coming years
of sodium laser guide star technology these telescopes. to reduce or eliminate the effects of
at ESO was made in 2009. The laser spot elongation (Beckers, 1992; Beletic
research and development programme To produce sufficiently bright guide et al., 2005) in large aperture telescopes
has led to the implementation of a stars, lasers at 589 nm with powers of and to determine the rapidly varying
narrowband Raman fibre laser emitting around 20 W Continuous Wave (CW) sodium profile precisely, but have not yet
at the wavelength of the sodium lines and extremely good beam quality are been pursued.
at 589 nm with demonstrated power needed. The brightness of the guide star
beyond 50 W. Fibre lasers are rugged depends, amongst other things, on Dye lasers provided the first generation
and reliable, making them promising the detailed atomic physics of the sodium of 589-nm lasers to the astronomical
candidates for use in the next genera- layer. As this has not been well mod- community. They were the only possible
tion of laser guide star systems, such elled, extensive design simulations of the choice at the time when Keck and ESO
as the Adaptive Optics Facility planned mesospheric sodium return flux have decided to build their laser guide star
for installation on VLT UT4 in 2013. been undertaken (Milonni et al., 1998; facilities. One model of a 589-nm dye
Drummond et al., 2004; Holzlöhner et al., laser was built by the Lawrence Livermore
2010). For the AOF multiple laser guide National Laboratory for the Lick and
Introduction star facility, this has resulted in specific Keck Observatories; a different dye laser
requirements on the optical characteristics model was made for ESO by the Max-
Laser guide stars (LGS) can be used of the laser, as summarised in Table 1. Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische
as reference beacons for adaptive optics Physik in Garching (Rabien et al, 2003), as
(AO) and significantly enlarge the sky Firstly, to facilitate efficient optical pump- part of the LGSF project (Bonaccini
coverage of AO on optical telescopes. ing and achieve small LGS sizes, the et al., 2003). Although extremely useful for
Sodium LGS are obtained by illuminating emitted laser-beam wavefront error has pioneering LGS–AO techniques and
the natural layer of atomic sodium in to be better than 70 nm root mean for conducting the first LGS–AO observa-
the mesosphere at 80–100 km altitude square (rms), with a goal of 25 nm rms. tions, this class of laser has the draw-
using a wavelength of 589 nm (the sodium Secondly, a highly polarised output back that it requires high maintenance
D2 lines) and causing it to fluoresce. is needed to produce circular polarisation and preparation time before an observing
In this way, an artificial “star” can be pro- and perform optical pumping of the night, which, at astronomical observato-
duced that is a useful alternative to a mesospheric sodium atoms, which further ries, creates manpower loads with a
natural guide star where none exists at enhances the resonant backscatter considerable footprint on the observatory
that sky location. AO uses the laser guide signal. Circular polarisation is obtained operation. These considerations make dye
stars as reference sources to probe by, for example, inserting a quarter-wave lasers possibly undesirable candidates
atmospheric turbulence and provide feed- plate in the launch telescope system. for multiple laser guide star systems. Fur-
back to deformable mirrors in order to Finally, re-pumping of the sodium atoms thermore, dye lasers are limited to stable
compensate image blur effects induced is extremely advantageous (Kibblewhite, gravity vector installations.
by this turbulence. Sodium LGS produce 2008) for the LGS return flux and is
less focus anisoplanatism (cone effect) achieved by emitting two identical laser When the first conceptual design of the
than Rayleigh LGS and they can probe lines at the centres of the D2a and the AOF multiple laser guide star facility
the entire extent of the atmosphere D2b sodium lines, with an intensity ratio of was conceived at the end of 2005, off-the-
(Ageorges & Dainty, 2000).
Parameter Value
Several large telescopes are equipped Format CW (continuous wave)
Table 1. Laser optical characteristics
with AO and LGS facilities, and future Wavelength 589 nm
specified for the VLT Adaptive Optics
Extremely Large Telescopes will require Power (laser device/in air) 20 W/16 W Facility.
LGS–AO for some operational modes. Linewidth < 5 MHz
1
D2b re-pumping denotes blue-shift-
ESO installed its first laser guide star Polarisation Linear, Pol. ratio > 100 : 1
ing a fraction of the D2a line laser
on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) Unit Wavefront error (rms) < 70 nm (< 25 nm goal)
power by 1.71 GHz in order to boost
Telescope 4 (UT4; Yepun) for the NACO Sodium D2b re-pumping ratio1 12 % the sodium fluorescence efficiency.
Courtesy of G. Hüdepohl
(Yepun) shown with
the characteristics listed above, did not
the LGSF laser beam
exist and ESO therefore launched an propagated at Paranal.
internal research and development (R&D) The Galactic Centre
programme to support the goal of is visible over the dome.
The photograph, taken
achieving second generation laser char-
in 2007, is a 5-s expo-
acteristics: turn-key, compact, solid-state sure during full Moon.
CW lasers at 589 nm to be used rou-
tinely, requiring limited maintenance, and
sufficiently ruggedised to be mounted
next to the laser launch telescopes on
the altitude structure of the telescope.
fully, but it seemed at that time very we further narrowed down the technology fication with powers of about 40 W CW
unlikely that they can ever lase directly at to Raman fibre lasers, because existing at 1178 nm. As an illustration, the power
1178 nm, while suppressing the ampli- rare-earth doped fibre lasers have low density in a 5-micron core fibre at
fied spontaneous emission at shorter gain at 1178 nm. In contrast to rare-earth 40 W exceeds 2 × 108 W/cm2, giving rise
wavelengths, in particular to 1064 nm. doped fibre amplifiers, such as the well- to nonlinear effects due to the interaction
VECSELs (Vertical External Cavity Sur- known EDFAs (erbium-doped fibre ampli- of the electromagnetic radiation with
face Emitting Laser, also called Optically fiers), Raman fibre amplifiers take ad the glass. Today, other laser technologies
Pumped Semiconductor Lasers) were vantage of a nonlinear conversion process such as the photonic crystal ytterbium
considered and discussed with Coherent in the fibre which converts “pump energy” lasers/amplifiers, VECSELs, and bismuth-
Inc. in Santa Clara, but their technology from the laser at short wavelengths to doped fibre lasers have risen in tech
readiness was low for our application. the signal wavelength via optical phonons, nology readiness level to become poten-
We therefore further explored the boom- rather than via atomic transitions. As tial laser sources at 1178 nm, both CW
ing fibre laser technology for the following shown below, however, we had initially to or pulsed. Furthermore, new fibre lasers/
reasons: overcome several technological problems. amplifiers allow novel sum-frequency
– fibre lasers are alignment-free, being photon combinations to reach 589 nm,
long waveguides with the photons con- Broadband Raman fibre amplifiers (RFA) using fibre lasers with rare earth dopants
fined to the fibre core; are extensively used in the telecom such as thulium or neodymium; however,
– their output optical beam quality is munications market. Our challenge was these developments have yet to be fully
diffraction-limited in single mode fibres to achieve narrowband fibre Raman ampli- demonstrated.
at the powers of interest to us;
– the heat is distributed along the fibre
volume, hence there are no overheating
locations in the fibre laser creating strain, Nonlinear optical effects in optical fibres SRS
lifetime, or beam optical quality issues Stimulated Raman scattering is the non
at the powers of interest to us, contrary Sufficient optical intensities can momen linear effect at the core of our RFA technol-
to other known solid-state lasers such tarily modify the optical properties of ogy, producing a frequency shift, in this
as VECSELs or waveguide amplifiers; a medium so that its behaviour depends case of the 1120-nm photons of the pump
nonlinearly on light power. This circum- fibre laser to 1178 nm. SRS is a combi
– there is a robust industrial base for
stance can be expressed mathematically nation of the Raman inelastic scattering
fibre lasers, and they are commercially
by expanding the susceptibility χ, which process with stimulated emission, which
available (at other wavelengths than describes the dependence of the optical amplifies the optical signal with low noise
1178 nm) with powers even higher than polarisation of a medium on the electric and distributed amplification along the
required; field, in a Taylor series. The second-order fibre. The pump photons undergo inelastic
– fibre lasers can be rack-mounted and term χ(2) is responsible for second har- scattering with the glass molecules of
located further away from the com- monic generation and sum-frequency gen- the fibre core, exciting vibration states and
pact 589-nm SHG unit using the fibre eration (SFG) that are used for frequency creating “optical phonons”, which divert
laser output as relay. Thus it is pos- conversion in materials such as lithium part of the photon energy so that the pump
sible to create compact laser heads, tri-borate (LBO). However, the silica glass, photons at 1120 nm are shifted to longer
where the 589-nm light is produced, of which optical fibres are made, obeys wavelengths, known as the Stokes shift.
that are mounted directly on board the a structural centre symmetry, implying that The extent of the wavelength shift and the
laser launch telescope; χ(2) vanishes, and thus χ(3) is the first non- efficiency of the Raman process at a given
– fibre lasers are simple and contain zero nonlinear expansion term (χ(3) is a light intensity are related to the material
complex third-order tensor; Boyd, 2003). composition and the index profile of the
very few components, hence are gener-
In the particle picture, χ(3) effects describe fibre core.
ally more reliable and also intrinsically
the interaction of four different photons.
cheaper than other lasers. SBS
Nonlinear effects due to χ(3) can be con- Stimulated Brillouin scattering limits the
Fibre laser technology has made very ceptually divided into parametric effects, output power of the RFA, depending on its
fast progress in recent years, with Raman including the Kerr nonlinearity (index emitted linewidth. It arises from the inter
fibre lasers used in the telecom indus- variation of the glass due to high electric action of photons with acoustic phonons
try, and ytterbium lasers used in the fields that can induce self-focusing and generated in the fibre core. In a simplified
material processing and the car industry, self-phase modulation), four-wave mixing model of SBS via the electrostrictive ef-
among others. This development has (FWM) and non-parametric processes fect, a travelling acoustic wave is created
led to the availability of in-fibre compo- in which light energy is exchanged with the that carries forward a periodic variation
nents such as fibre Bragg gratings (FBG, glass, such as stimulated Raman scatter- of refractive index in the fibre core, produc-
equivalent to free-space mirrors placed ing (SRS) and stimulated Brillouin scatter- ing, in effect, a long optical grating that
inside the fibre), fibre couplers (equivalent ing (SBS). While we exploit SRS in Raman reflects part of the signal back towards the
amplification, SBS and FWM are unwanted seed laser (see Figure 3). The grating
to free-space beam splitters), and wave-
effects. Brief explanations of these effects, modulation is amplified progressively to
length division multiplexers (WDM, equiv-
important for the LGS development, are gether with the Raman signal. The onset of
alent to free-space dichroics). In the presented. SBS with increasing power is very sudden,
broad technological class of fibre lasers,
ML/NVDQ6
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ML
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Figure 5. The layout of the Raman fibre amplifier is Raman amplifier results Figure 6. The 1178-nm RFA output power as a func-
shown. The output from a high power pump fibre tion of the pump power at 1120 nm is shown. The
laser at 1121 nm is coupled via a fused glass optical maximum value obtained is 39 W. The onset of SBS
fibre coupler into a fibre spool, where it amplifies We have progressively increased the (black curve, right axis) is seen as return light going
the output of a low power seed laser at 1178 nm by achieved RFA power once the right meth- back toward the optically isolated seed source. The
the nonlinear optical process of Stimulated Raman ods to overcome SBS were found, RFA optical conversion efficiency is 28 % and its
Scattering. wall-plug efficiency 5 %.
following the progressive availability of the
necessary fibre components. From 4 W
technologies have different pros and output power at 1178 nm in November
cons for the RFA and pose different risks. 2007, we moved to 39 W in August 2009,
Today we can say that both approaches maintaining a linewidth below 1.5 MHz
have been highly successful, meeting and an all-fibre system. In August 2009 record power and intensity output from a
and exceeding their goal targets. PM RFA we had reached 39 W CW with a single narrowband RFA at spectral power densi-
solutions are to be preferred because non-PM RFA system developed in-house, ties well in excess of those normally toler-
they are simpler to implement and are together with a novel 150-W fibre laser able in non-SBS-suppressed systems.
thus becoming commercially available. pump at 1120 nm (Feng et al., 2009); see
Figure 6. Using an adaptation of the The spectral properties of the RFA
Besides developing the RFA and inte technology developed at ESO, MPBC Inc. output are shown in Figure 7, which indi-
grating them in the laser system at our in Canada had produced 44 W with a cates a very clean spectrum with more
labs, we have explored the scalability single PM RFA by the end of 2009. These than 45 dB emission above amplified
of power, successfully developing coher- RFAs give ample margin to reach 20 W spontaneous emission and a linewidth of
ent beam combination (CBC) schemes. at 589 nm — the laser power specifi below 1.5 MHz, measured at 39 W.
In the following sections we report the cation for the AOF with four LGS and the The 1178-nm laser beam is collimated and
results obtained with the single RFA and E-ELT LGS system — with adequate mode-matched to a compact resonant
with coherent beam combination. linewidth. These results represent both cavity (Figure 8). Frequency doubling
1% $LHRRHNM+HMD@SML 1% $LHRRHNM2ODBSQTL
l
(MSDMRHSX@QA
TMHS
l
(MSDMRHSXC!
#NTAKHMF"@UHSX
without lifetime issues. Optical conversion
efficiencies up to 86 % have been
(RNK@SNQ
achieved (Taylor et al., 2009), thanks both
+!.
to the diffraction-limited beam quality
of the single mode RFA (ensuring a good 2DDC
mode-matching capability) and the
RFA low intensity/phase noise behaviour.
28 W CW at 589 nm have been obtained , R , R /HDYN
(Feng et al., 2009) with a single RFA and
SHG in September 2009 (Figure 9 and
10), with excellent beam wavefront quality.
MLK@RDQONVDQ@MCBNMUDQRHNMDEjBHDMBX
"NMUDQRHNM$EjBHDMBX
ML/NVDQ6
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Figure 9. Plots of laser output power at 589 nm (yel- Figure 10. Photograph of the compact bow-tie SHG
low curve, left axis) and SHG efficiency (black curve, cavity with the 30-mm LBO crystal mounted in its
right axis) are shown as a function of the 1178-nm temperature controlled oven (centre). The 1178-nm
power entering the SHG cavity, obtained with the laser beam enters from the left side into the crystal;
single RFA. the generated thin yellow beam is visible to the right,
exiting the crystal.
(MSDMRHSXKHM
RB@KD@QA
TMHSR
ML
%6', ,'Y
3Q@MRLHRRHNM
Figure 2. A picture of the bolometer array at the
%QDPTDMBX&'Y
focal plane of SABOCA. One bolometer cell is about
1 mm in size and the full size of the array is about
15 mm. The two red circles show the position of the machined into a single aluminum block in and is formed by an interference filter
two blind bolometers. the machine shop at MPIfR. In com made of inductive and capacitive meshes
bination with the tertiary optics, the horn embedded in polypropylene. The low
TES thermistors on structured mem- antennas are optimised for coupling frequency edge of the band is defined by
branes. The thermistors are bilayers of to the telescope’s main beam at a wave- the cutoff of a cylindrical waveguide. A
molybdenum and a gold-palladium alloy length of 350 μm. freestanding inductive mesh provides
deposited on silicon-nitride membranes shielding against radio frequency interfer-
together with the niobium wiring and SABOCA’s detectors are designed to ence.
the radiation absorbing layer. As part of work at a temperature of about 300 mK.
the manufacture process, the mem- This temperature is provided by a cryo- The TES bolometers are read out in
branes were structured at IPHT in order genic system made of a cryostat using a time-domain multiplexing scheme via
to control the thermal conductivity. liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, in com- four independent chains of SQUID
Several layouts have been studied, with bination with a closed-cycle helium-3 amplifiers and multiplexers, providing ten
different designs of membrane structures, sorption cooler. After achieving high channels each for a total of 40 possible
thermistors and absorbing elements. vacuum insulation, the cryostat is filled elements. The multiplexers and asso
The bolometers selected for SABOCA with the liquid cryogens. A dry (scroll) ciated electronics have been designed
(see Figure 1) have moderately structured pump, installed in the APEX Cassegrain and manufactured by IPHT. The four
membranes and showed a radiative noise cabin, is used to reduce the vapour pres- SQUID amplifiers are attached to the
equivalent power (NEP) of 1.6 × 10 –16 W/ sure on the liquid helium bath in order liquid helium cold plate and operated at
Hz1/2 (with 300 K background) during to lower the boiling point, reaching a tem- the temperature of the pumped liquid
laboratory tests at MPIfR at a transition perature of about 1.6 K. This operation helium (~ 1.6 K). The 40 multiplexing
temperature of 0.45 K. requires about one hour. A single stage SQUIDs are located in four groups of ten
helium-3 sorption cooler (of the type at the four sides of the bolometer array.
The array of SABOCA consists of 39 TES described by Chanin and Torre, 1984) is They are operated at the same tempera-
composite bolometers. Of these, 37 then operated to cool the focal plane ture as the bolometers (~ 300 mK).
are arranged in a hexagonal grid consist- to about 300 mK. The cryostat needs to
ing of a central channel and three con- be refilled, pumped and recycled every SQUIDs are extremely sensitive to mag-
centric hexagons. Two additional bolom- 48 hours. The helium pumping system netic fields. Thus, the level of static
eters, identical to the inner 37, but not and the operation of the sorption cooler (trapped flux) and variable (therefore inter-
optically coupled to horns (i.e. “blind” bo have been automated and remotely con- fering) magnetic fields in the Cassegrain
lometers) were added to the layout, at trolled, allowing operation of the tele- cabin of APEX are a concern. Several
two diametrically opposite positions, and scope during part of the cool-down proc- measures were taken to ensure that these
are used for monitoring purposes. The ess (about 2 hours). fields do not compromise the perform-
grid constant of the array is 2.0 mm (see ance of SABOCA: a) an external shield,
Figure 2). The spectral response of SABOCA (Fig- made of high magnetic permeability metal
ure 3) is defined by a set of cold filters, (called mu-metal) is wrapped around
A monolithic array of conical horn anten- installed inside the cryostat, mounted the lower part of the cryostat; b) the mul-
nas, placed in front of the bolometer on the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tiplexing SQUIDs have input coils dif
wafer, concentrates the radiation onto the shields. The passband is centred at ferentially coupled, therefore only sensitive
bolometers. The 37 conical horns were 852 GHz (352 μm), about 120 GHz wide, to gradients of the magnetic field; c) the
2 !." !D@LL@Ol2B@M
alias filtering and down-sampling) of the precipitable water vapour [PVW] ~ 0.5 mm
raw data is possible, although not strictly and 60-degree source elevation), the
required. All the software modules of receiver sensitivity translates into an on-
SABOCA provide SCPI interfaces (Stand- sky sensitivity of 750 mJy s1/2 . In terms
ard Commands for Programmable In of mapping speed, that value corresponds
strumentation), allowing full remote oper- to a uniform coverage of a 10 × 10 arc-
ation of the instrument. minute sky area down to a residual root
$(NEERDS
mean square (rms) noise of ~ 300 mJy/
beam in one hour of observing time (two
Performance on sky hours including overheads). The image
in Figure 5 for example was made in
Characterisation on sky of the final ver- 1.5 hours of on-source integration. The
sion of SABOCA was completed in effective sensitivity, however, strongly
l
February 2009. The array parameters are depends on the amount of PWV along the
estimated averaging the results of fully line of sight. An observing time calculator
l
YNEERDS
sampled maps (called beam maps) of is available online2.
planets with useful flux and angular size
Figure 4. On-sky footprint of SABOCA, derived from (namely Mars, Uranus and Neptune,
one single beam map of Mars. The beam distortions see Figure 4). The main beam, determined Science with SABOCA
are partially due to atmospheric refraction and fitting
accuracy. combining several beam maps, is cir-
cular and has a deconvolved full width at SABOCA is a versatile instrument that
half maximum (FWHM) of 7.8 arcseconds, can observe a range of objects of great
array and multiplexers are enclosed in a close to the expected value of 7.5 arc- interest in the different fields of today’s
capsule, on the helium-3 stage, made of seconds. The beam starts to deviate from astrophysics: from our own Solar System
an aluminum alloy with a critical tempera- a Gaussian at a relative intensity of ~ 6 % to the debris discs around nearby young
ture of 1.2 K, which becomes super (–12 dB) where the error pattern of the stars; from molecular clouds and star-
conducting during operation. The horn telescope becomes visible. forming regions in our Milky Way to cold
array, also made of the same material, is dust in galaxies at various redshifts
part of the capsule; d) the readout SQUIDs The 37 on-sky bolometers of SABOCA and evolutionary stages; all the way to
are protected by shields made of Cryo all perform better, in terms of detector the early epochs of the Universe, con-
perm (a type of mu-metal for low tempera- noise distribution, than the bolometers straining the star formation rates in high-
ture applications); e) only selected non- with semiconducting thermistors (used redshift starburst galaxies.
magnetic materials are employed in in LABOCA) and do not show 1/f noise
the surroundings of the array. The opera- down to below 30 mHz. The clean quality Within the first year of operations, a
tion of SABOCA at APEX confirmed of the signals is mainly due to the use number of important scientific results have
the reproducibility of the SQUIDs’ opera- of the new superconducting TES bolom- already been obtained with SABOCA.
tion point and therefore the effectiveness eters, which are practically insensitive One of the most frequent applications of
of the shielding. The multiplexing fre- to microphonics, and therefore particu- this new bolometer camera has been in
quency is fixed to 2 kHz, which gives 200 larly suitable for a noisy environment like follow-up observations of targets already
samples per second per bolometer. the Cassegrain cabin of APEX. observed with LABOCA. The 2.5 times
higher angular resolution of SABOCA can
So as to be fully integrated into the APEX Following the successful example of reveal new details in the morphology
environment, SABOCA is provided LABOCA, SABOCA has also been de of sources with compact extended emis-
with a hardware/software infrastructure signed to be operated in “fast scanning” sion. In parallel, its spectral passband
similar to that of LABOCA. Front-end mode (Reichertz et al., 2001) without centred at 350 µm complements the
software (running on the same front-end chopping the secondary mirror. The determination of the characteristic tem-
computer used by LABOCA) is used observing modes, therefore, are the same peratures of sources.
to control and monitor the hardware of as for LABOCA, but scaled to the differ-
the system (temperature monitoring, ent size of the beam and of the array: spi- To display the mapping capabilities
SQUID tuning, helium pumping and ral patterns, a raster of spirals for compact of SABOCA, in Figure 5 we show a large
recycling, and more). The back-end soft- sources and rectangular on-the-fly for map of the 350-µm emission from the
ware (running on the same back-end large maps of extended sources (for more Orion Molecular Cloud-1 (OMC-1) that, at
computer used by LABOCA) is used to details see Siringo et al. [2009] or online1). a distance of 400 parsec, is the closest
collect the bolometer signals from the known star-forming region undergoing
de-multiplexing electronics and to provide The sensitivity of SABOCA was derived massive star formation. The map covers
a networked data stream required by from blank-sky observations after cor a sky area of more than 10 × 10 arcmi
the APEX control software. With the use related noise removal. The mean receiver nutes with an angular resolution of
of the same bridge computer as LABOCA, sensitivity was found to be 200 mJy s1/2. ~ 8 arcseconds and with a uniform resid-
real-time digital signal processing (anti- For average observing conditions (i.e. ual noise of ~ 100 mJy/beam. It required
l
l
l
Figure 7. SABOCA map
of the “Eyelash”, the
brightest sub-mm galaxy
known to date, at
l l z = 2.326. The observed
350-µm flux is
GLR GLR GLR GLR GLR 530 ± 60 mJy (colour bar
1 ) in signal-to-noise units).
GLR GLR GLR GLR This map has a diameter
1 ) of 180 arcseconds.
Figure 5. The Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1) as new superconducting technology (TES
seen by SABOCA at 350 µm. Contours show the
bolometers and SQUID amplification and 20
flux at 0.3 %, 1.0 %, 3.0 %, 10 %, 30 % of the 720 Jy/
beam peak at the centre of the map. multiplexing) is viable outside of the
protected environment of the laboratory.
With proper shielding, the devices can
1.5 hours of on-source integration time be used even in an electromagnetically 10
under very good sky conditions (PWV polluted environment, such as the
~ 0.1 mm). Figure 6 shows the Orion Mo Cassegrain cabin of APEX. Moreover, our
lecular Cloud-3 (OMC-3, located about tests at the MPIfR lab have also shown
20 arcminutes north of OMC-1) belonging that the superconducting technology 0
to the same dense filament of which is compatible with the use of a pulse tube
OMC-1 is the brightest part. It features cooler (a type of closed-cycle cooling
a chain of very young, deeply embedded machine), thus allowing instruments to be
–10
low- to intermediate-mass protostars operated without the need for regular
(Chini et al., 1997). replenishment of liquid cryogens. An im
mediate advantage of a bolometer
Figure 7 shows SABOCA observations of camera based on superconducting tech- References
SMM J2135-0102, also known as the nology and operated on closed-cycle cry-
Chanin, G. & Torre, J. P. 1984, J. Opt. Soc. Am.
“Eyelash”. This object, at z = 2.326, is the ogenics is the option of keeping the A., 1, 412
brightest sub-mm galaxy known to date receiver cold most of the time with mini- Chini, R. et al. 1997, ApJL, 474, L135
(see article by Swinbank et al., p. 42). The mum maintenance. This would greatly Dowell, C. D. et al. 2003, Proc. SPIE, 4855, 73D
enhance the operability of the system, Griffin, M. et al. 2006, Proc. SPIE, 6265, 7G
source shows a 350-µm peak flux of
Guesten, R. et al. 2006, A&A, 454L, 13
530 mJy and was detected at a 20 σ level allowing a more flexible observing sched- Guesten, R. et al. 2008, Proc. SPIE, 7020
in a total observing time of 2.7 hours ule and reducing the work load for the Reichertz, L. A. et al. 2001, A&A, 379, 735
(including all overheads). The map was ordinary maintenance of the receiver at Siringo, G. et al. 2007, The Messenger, 129, 2
the telescope. Siringo, G. et al. 2009, A&A, 497, 945
obtained with a sequence of scans in
raster spirals observing mode, providing
a fully sampled image. Links
Acknowledgements
1
bserving with LABOCA: http://www.apex-
O
Some of the results published here were observed telescope.org/bolometer/laboca/observing/
New possibilities for APEX during ESO Director’s Discretionary Time. The 2
SABOCA observing time calculator:
authors would like to thank Mark Swinbank for pro- http://www.apex-telescope.org/bolometer/saboca/
The successful commissioning of viding SABOCA data from one of his observing obscalc/
projects (see Swinbank et al., p. 42). We acknowl-
SABOCA on APEX has further signifi- edge the APEX staff members for their support dur-
cance: it demonstrates that the ing installation and commissioning.
1
epartment of Physics, University of
D Table 1. Design specifications for the KMOS spectrograph.
Durham, United Kingdom Parameter Final Design
2
Universitätssternwarte München, Instrument total throughput (mean) IZ > 20 %, YJ > 20 %, H > 30 %, K > 30 %
Germany Wavelength coverage 0.8 to 2.5 µm
3
United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Spectral resolution R = 3300, 3400, 3800, 3800 (IZ, YJ, H, K)
Centre, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, Number of IFUs 24
United Kingdom Extent of each IFU 2.8 × 2.8 arcseconds
4
Max-Planck-Institut für extraterres- Spatial sampling 0.2 × 0.2 arcseconds
trische Physik, Garching, Germany Patrol field 7.2-arcminute diameter circle
5
Sub-Department of Astrophysics, Close packing of IFUs > 3 within 1 sq. arcminute
University of Oxford, United Kingdom Closest approach of IFUs Edge-to-edge separation of > 6 arcseconds
6
ESO
800
Detectors 600
400
The KMOS detector system and elec 200
tronics are being developed at ESO
0
Garching and will use the latest genera-
tion of Hawaii-2RG detectors in com 0 500 1000 1500
bination with the new Next Generation
Controller (NGC) readout system. The With over 4000 spectra per integration, off arms, IFUs, spectrograph and detector
detectors will be fully substrate-removed automatic data processing and reduction system. Figure 9 shows the technical “first
to give excellent quantum efficiency methods will be essential to exploit fully light” KMOS spectrum with the instrument
(> 80 %) across the whole 0.8 to 2.5 µm the scientific potential of KMOS. The data cold, obtained using the instrument cali-
region and have excellent performance reduction pipeline is being developed bration unit on 20 January 2010. This sig-
(readout noise < 10 e – rms on all four at the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterres- nificant milestone, which tests all the inte-
detectors for a single double-correlated trische Physik (MPE) and will make use grated subsystems, marks the first step
sample (DCS) readout; dark current at of the considerable experience and towards Provisional Acceptance Europe,
T = 60 K is < 0.001 e –/sec/pixel). Each de heritage available from the VLT SINFONI after which KMOS will be shipped to
tector is adjusted manually for tip-tilt, but instrument. Paranal to begin telescope commission-
is mounted on a remotely operated focus ing. We look forward to seeing the first
stage (Figure 8). exciting science from KMOS in 2011/12.
Current status
Christophe Martayan 1, 2 confusion with other classes of objects so that these problems do not arise (cf.
Dietrich Baade 1 by means of simple colour–magnitude Figure 1). However, in crowded areas
Juan Fabregat 3 diagrams provides many more suitable spectra will overlap and a narrowband fil-
target fields in the Magellanic Clouds ter may be needed to reduce the length
than the Galaxy, where distance moduli of the spectra. For the same reason,
1
ESO are extremely difficult to determine. At the spectral resolution must be low. If the
2
GEPI, Observatoire de Paris, France least as valuable, from a diagnostic point field of view is large and the objects
3
Observatori Astronòmic, Universitat de of view, is the lower metallicity (ZSMC ≈ stand out well above the background flux,
València, Spain 0.1 ZA and ZLMC ≈ 0.4 ZA), which places then the multiplex of a slitless spectro
such studies into a wider perspective of graph is unrivalled.
stellar evolution and rotation.
The slitless-spectroscopy mode of At ESO, the grism mode of the Wide Field
the Wide Field Imager was used for a In fact, Martayan et al. (2006, 2007) and Imager (WFI; Baade et al., 1999) attached
comprehensive survey of the Magel- Hunter et al. (2008) have already found to the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope
lanic Clouds to detect stars exhibiting that OB and A-type stars rotate faster at at La Silla offered such observing oppor-
Hα line emission. A total of eight mil- low metallicity than at high metallicity. tunities. It could utilise about 75 % of
lion spectra were recorded. Analysis of This can be understood as the result of the direct imaging field of view of 34 ×
84 open star clusters in the Small Mag- radiatively-driven winds being weaker 33 arcmin2 so that, with 14 and 20 point-
ellanic Cloud confirms that the fraction at lower metallicity and removing less ings, a good coverage of the main areas
of extremely rapidly rotating Be stars angular momentum. If there are fewer of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and
increases with decreasing metallicity. metals, the fraction of the stellar radiation Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), respec-
The very large database also enables that can be absorbed by them is lower, tively, could be achieved (see Figure 2). In
other aspects of the complex interplay and the resulting reduced effective radia- the SMC, the mean Hα width for Be stars
of early-type stars with stellar evolution, tion pressure leads to weaker winds is about 5 nm (range, 0.5–7 nm) thus
metallicity, mass loss and rapid rotation and mass loss. Since ultra-fast rotation corresponding to a nominal resolution of
to be examined. seems to play a dominant role in Be 5.1 nm at Hα (or R = 128), very well
stars, the frequency of Be stars should matched to the resolving power of 130
increase with decreasing metallicity. with the R50 grism. Since even the
The Be star phenomenon Some preliminary empirical evidence has Hα lines of Be stars remain just unre-
already been reported by Maeder et al. solved, the detection sensitivity is ma-
Be stars are B-type stars that have been (1999). However, this work only rests on a ximised. A filter of 7.4-nm bandpass,
observed to exhibit Hα in emission at small number of open clusters. A broader roughly centred on Hα, was inserted into
least once. They rotate so close to the survey is desirable to disentangle the the beam in order to limit the length of
break-up velocity that some relatively partially overlapping effects of rotation the spectra and, thereby, their crowding.
minor extra kick in velocity, for example and evolution that can lead to wrong con-
by non-radial pulsation, magnetic flares, clusions. The observations were carried out on
or in an eccentric binary orbit, can make 25 and 26 September 2002. Due to poor
the star lose matter that then forms a weather the second night was only partly
circumstellar disc. The Hα line emission Spectro-tiling the Magellanic Clouds with useful. The typical exposure times were
resulting from the recombination of the the Wide Field Imager 600 seconds, thus allowing the detec-
gas, which is ionised by the hot central tion of main sequence stars up to type F.
star, is strongly broadened by the rapid Even after careful pre-selection of candi- The seeing was about 1.1 arcseconds.
rotation of the disc. The effects of rotation date objects, any attempt to obtain fairly No direct images were taken due to bad
still pose a challenge to stellar evolution complete coverage of the Magellanic weather although this was foreseen. The
models, and mass loss from early-type Clouds with conventional multi-object main disadvantages of the absence of
stars has a strong impact on the chemi- spectroscopy techniques is hopeless in direct images are: the difficulty of obtain-
cal and dynamical evolution of their host view of the large amount of telescope ing accurate astrometry, so the astromet-
galaxies. Therefore, Be stars are promi- time required. Moreover, the widespread ric calculations had to be based on the
nent astrophysical reference laboratories. diffuse background emission in the centre of the spectra; the absence of cor-
Magellanic Clouds would require slits to responding photometry on the same date
The evolutionary phase(s) during which be used in order to identify objects with (to mitigate the variability typical of Be
this Be phenomenon occurs, as well as intrinsic line emission, thereby eliminating stars), which helps in the classification of
the mechanism(s) over and above ro- fibre-fed spectrographs that do not have the stars.
tation that cause the mass loss, are not integral field units, and so much reducing
strongly constrained by observations. the achievable multiplex.
Therefore, a broad survey of Be stars in
both open clusters and the field is impor- By contrast, a slitless spectrograph de-
tant. The multitude of stellar emission- livers spectra of all sufficiently bright
line objects and the ability to suppress sources and the entire background area
1DK@SHUDkTW
While the circumstellar emission (left) is found with
both instruments, only the slit spectrum (lower right)
includes a strong emission line from the large-scale
diffuse nebulosity. On account of the lack of spa-
tial resolution across the single fibre, it is not possi-
ble to decide whether or not the emission line is
'α
'α intrinsic to the star (lower right). Only the slitless
spectrum (upper right) reveals that the line emission
6@UDKDMFSGÄ
6@UDKDMFSGÄ
is not associated with the object. These two Galactic
stars from the open cluster NGC 6611 were ob-
served with a broader WFI filter than the one used
for the Magellanic Clouds.
"NTMSR
"NTMSR
6@UDKDMFSGML 6@UDKDMFSGML
Extraction and analysis of the WFI slitless spectra were arranged in a photo-album- higher than twice the ambient continuum
spectra like fashion, making the detection by level, was successfully detected in the
eye, even of a large number of line emis- WFI spectra. Thus completeness of the
In total, the raw data include spectra of sion sources, quite manageable. compiled Be-star catalogue begins to fail
about three million sources in the SMC at a spectral type of B3.
and roughly five million sources in the For each extracted source, astrometry
LMC. Thanks to a special adaption of the was performed with the ASTROM pack-
SExtractor code (Bertin & Arnouts, 1996) age of Wallace & Gray (2003), assigning Results
the detection and extraction of the spec- the source coordinates to the centre
tra could be performed fully automa of the spectrum. The achieved accuracy The SMC database includes 84 open
tically. With the help of an initial astro of about 0.5–1 arcseconds was sufficient clusters. The combined colour–magni-
metric solution, spectral order –1 was to cross-identify the WFI sources with tude diagram of the stars classified with
identified; subsequently this order alone photometric catalogues such as OGLE. the WFI is presented in Figure 3, distin-
was used for analysis. Using additional calibrations, the OGLE guishing stars with and without Hα line
photometry was converted into approxi- emission. The comparison in Figure 4
The very difficult (out-of-focus) point mate spectral types so that the detected of the fraction of emission-line stars per
spread function (cf. Martayan et al., 2010) emission-line sources could be classified. spectral sub-type between the Galaxy
rendered various neural network codes (McSwain & Gies, 2005) and the SMC
unable to find emission-line objects with The reliability of the detection process shows a clear overfrequency by up to a
acceptable failure rates. Therefore, we was verified by means of higher resolu- factor of five of Be stars at low metal-
developed the IDL code Album, which tion FLAMES spectra of 31 emission-line licity. Further analysis suggests that this
computes a regional average spectrum sources in the field of the SMC open result can no longer be dominated by
and subtracts it from each extracted cluster NGC 330, of which 28 are classi- evolutionary differences. Therefore, the
source, satisfying a number of quality cri- cal Be stars, while the other three are of expectation is confirmed that, because
teria (tilt angle of the spectrum, distor- a different nature (planetary nebula, B[e] low metallicity stars lose less angular
tion, etc). In the resulting difference spec- star and supergiant). Up to a V magni- momentum through their radiatively-driven
tra, the Hα line emission stands out fairly tude of 16.5, line emission above 100 nm winds, and thus, on average, rotate more
prominently. Therefore, the difference equivalent width or with a peak intensity rapidly, Be stars are more abundant in
+,"
+," +," +," +," +,"
+," +," +," +," +," +," +," +," +,"
+," +," +," +," +,"
α
G LM R G LM R G LM R G LM R
2,"
δ
1*&
l
2,"
2,"
1*&
α
G LM R G LM R G LM R
the SMC than in the Galaxy. Extrapolated In both the Galaxy and the SMC, the vari- tion. But others are already formed as Be
to the extremely low metallicity of first ation of the fraction of Be stars with stars. Probably, the evolution of the
generation stars, this result suggests spectral type is about the same and, fractional critical rotation rate Ω/Ωc is the
that, in the early Universe, rapid rotation therefore, does not depend on metallicity. key parameter governing these differ-
and the Be phenomenon were probably From the distribution with cluster age ences. Due to the metallicity dependence
more common. Such stars may also be it is apparent that the Be phenomenon is of mass loss, the evolution of Ω/Ωc, too,
related to the predecessors of gamma- strongest in the latter half of the main depends on metallicity. However, this
ray bursters, which may require very rapid sequence phase. Accordingly, some dependency is different for different mass
rotation to develop an accretion disc that B-type stars acquire Be characteristics ranges, requiring a large database for its
controls the formation of polar jets. only during their main sequence evolu- observational analysis.
Acknowledgement
References
30
Baade, D. et al. 1999, The Messenger, 95, 15
Bertin, E. & Arnouts, S. 1996, A&AS, 117, 393
Meyssonnier, N. & Azzopardi, M. 1993, A&AS, 102, 20
451
Hunter, I. et al. 2008, A&A, 479, 541
Maeder, A., Grebel, E. K. & Mermilliod, J.-C. 1999,
A&A, 346, 459 10
Martayan, C. et al. 2006, A&A, 452, 273
Martayan, C. et al. 2007, A&A, 462, 683
Martayan, C., Baade, D. & Fabregat, J. 2010, A&A, 0
509, A11 B0 B1 B2 B3
McSwain, M. V. & Gies, D. R. 2005, ApJS, 161, 118 Spectral subtype
Wallace, P. T. & Gray, N. 2003, ASTROM User Guide
Figure 4. Percentage per spectral subtype of Be SMC Be/(all B)
stars among all B-type stars. Dark blue left bars are Galaxy Be/(all B)
for the SMC (Martayan et al., 2010), and light blue
right bars present the Galactic data (McSwain &
Gies, 2005). The WFI sample is incomplete for stars
with spectral type B3 and later.
Thomas Lebzelter 1 prime areas of astronomical research for at such a resolution across the HRD is
Andreas Seifahrt 2, 11 the coming decades. This part of the not yet available.
Suzanne Ramsay 3 spectrum opens up a universe of “cool”
Pedro Almeida 3 phenomena, such as discs, planets Against the background of this unsatis-
Stefano Bagnulo 4 or the extended atmospheres of evolved factory situation, we have formed a team
Thomas Dall 3 stars. with research interests spread all across
Henrik Hartman 5 the HRD and with the common intention
Gaitee Hussain 3 In order to understand the contents of of optimising the usability of the NIR
Hans Ulrich Käufl 3 the NIR spectral range better, high reso- range for high spectral resolution studies,
Maria-Fernanda Nieva 6 lution spectroscopy is mandatory. Con- mainly focused on deriving element
Norbert Przybilla 7 siderable progress has been achieved abundances in stellar atmospheres. As a
Ulf Seemann 2, 3 over the past twenty years concerning consequence, we proposed to obtain
Alain Smette 3 the sensitivity and size of infrared detec- high resolution spectra of the complete
Stefan Uttenthaler 8 tors, allowing efficient spectrographs for NIR wavelength range for a sample of
Glenn Wahlgren 9, 10 the near-infrared to be built for current bright stars of various luminosity, temper-
Burkhard Wolff 3 astronomical use. However, to utilise this ature, and chemical composition using
part of the spectrum fully, detailed knowl- CRIRES at the VLT (currently mounted
edge of the range of spectral features is on Unit Telescope 1, UT1). The CRIRES
1
Department of Astronomy, University of necessary. This requirement has not yet instrument is one of the current work-
Vienna, Austria been reached: line lists, especially for the horses in the area of high resolution NIR
2
University of Göttingen, Germany various molecules, are inaccurate and/or spectroscopy 1. A detailed description of
3
ESO incomplete; many weak lines have not this spectrograph can be found in Käufl
4
Armagh Observatory, United Kingdom been identified or studied; and the wide- et al. (2004).
5
Lund Observatory, Sweden spread telluric absorption features are
6
Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, a source of confusion. The potential for Our proposal comes as a filler pro-
Garching, Germany important discoveries in spectra taken gramme for UT1, as the brightness of the
7
Dr. Remeis Observatory, Bamberg, with ESO’s CRyogenic Infra-Red Echelle stars and the flexibility of the wave-
Germany Spectrograph (CRIRES) will not be re length settings allow us to use almost any
8
Institute for Astronomy, Katholieke alised until the spectral features can be weather conditions. Our proposal was
Universiteit Leuven, Belgium identified and line data are made availa- granted observing time both in semesters
9
Catholic University of America, ble. P84 and P85 to begin the collection of
Washington, USA a CRIRES spectral library, which, in suc-
10
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, A public library of high resolution NIR cession to the UVES Paranal Observa-
Greenbelt, USA spectra of stars of various types through- tory Project (UVES–POP2), was named
11
University of California, Davis, USA out the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram CRIRES–POP. A continuation of the pro-
(HRD) is needed to meet this challenge. gramme in forthcoming semesters will
Such a library would not only provide a be proposed.
New instrumental capabilities and database from which to select the wave-
the wealth of astrophysical information length range best-suited to a specific
extractable from the near-infrared scientific question, but it would also be Target selection
wavelength region have led to a grow- used to compare observations with
ing interest in the field of high resolu- a reference star, for example in order to As a starting point for the target selec-
tion spectroscopy at 1–5 µm. A detailed measure abundance anomalies or to tion, we use the UVES–POP library
knowledge of the resident spectral detect indicators of faint companions. Full (Bagnulo et al, 2003). Thus, a considera-
features is necessary to fully utilise the coverage spectra of stars of different ble fraction of the NIR spectra of the stars
diagnostic power of this region of the effective temperature and surface gravity in our library will have continuous high
spectrum. We report on our ongoing will allow testing of not only atmospheric resolution extension towards the visual
project of obtaining a high resolution, models with an unprecedented accuracy, and blue range. A further criterion for
high signal-to-noise library of near- but also the atomic and molecular line target selection is a low rotation velocity,
infrared spectra between 1 and 5 µm data used in these models, and deter- to provide sharp-lined spectra. For stars
using the CRIRES spectrograph at the mine where improvements are required. at the extremes of the HRD, the UVES–
VLT. The library will be made public. POP targets are either too bright (at the
Earlier work, such as the atlas of the solar cool end) or too faint (at the hot end)
spectrum (Wallace et al., 1996) or for the to be observed with CRIRES. Alternative
After the long domination of astrophysical K giant Arcturus (Hinkle et al., 1995) illus- targets were chosen in these cases.
observations by the visual spectral range, trated the value of a stellar reference Whereas the UVES–POP library contains
the past years have very clearly shown spectrum at high spectral resolution and spectra of about 400 different stars, the
that the near- and mid-infrared (NIR and high signal-to-noise (S/N). However, an CRIRES–POP will be significantly smaller.
MIR) range will play a leading role in many inventory of complete NIR stellar spectra The CRIRES spectrograph can obtain
Science goals Figure 1. Spectral classification of the CRIRES–POP Hotter stars can also be used both as
targets in the first two observing periods (P84 telluric standards and to address scien-
and P85). The final library will consist of 25–30 stars.
The CRIRES–POP science goals are at tific questions. Most prominently, NIR
least as diverse as the fields of interest spectroscopy at high resolution will allow
of the team members. At the cool end of us to study the early phases of hot stars
the target list, a major goal is to identify when they are still enshrouded by the gas
line transitions of the molecules forming region for these studies is still ongoing and dust of their parental clouds.
in the atmospheres. Depending on the (e.g., Reiners et al., 2009) and no empiri-
prevailing chemistry of the target, either cal high resolution atlas for M dwarfs at The CRIRES–POP data will play a crucial
line transitions of oxygen-bearing mole- 1–5 µm exists to help evaluate other role in testing and improving model
cules (e.g., H 2O or SiO) or of carbon- spectral features beyond the well known atmosphere techniques across the HRD.
bearing molecules (CN-, CH-, C2-com CO overtone spectrum at 2.3 µm. The Quantitative analyses of NIR spectra
ponents) can be identified. Objects CRIRES–POP programme will address can involve a non-trivial extension of clas-
enriched in s-process elements (S-type this question and thus deliver an impor- sical work in the optical, in particular
stars) offer a unique opportunity to iden- tant input for the study of extrasolar plan- for the hotter stars. The challenge is to
tify lines of these interesting elements, ets. model non-local thermodynamic equilib-
but also of iron-peak elements whose line rium effects in the correct way. Surpris-
lists are far from complete in the NIR. A broad range of science goals related to ingly, even in the simplest case of hydro-
We expect that new diagnostic features understanding stars is directly met by gen, the atomic data were, until recently,
for studying the chemical and physical the CRIRES–POP programme. However, shown to be of insufficient quality to
properties of stellar atmospheres will be stellar photospheric features can also be achieve consistency from the optical and
identified in this way. Both the study and a source of systematic error, for example NIR analyses (Przybilla & Butler, 2004).
identification of molecular and atomic when seeking to detect a faint compan- CRIRES–POP data will guide the work on
lines requires collaboration with labora- ion or gas emission line from a circum- refining the modelling to facilitate unbi-
tory spectroscopists, who are among stellar disc. For example, Ramsay Howat ased stellar parameter and element
the members of our team. The CRIRES– & Greaves (2007) found that removal abundance determinations at high accu-
POP library and the lines identified in of the spectrum of the stellar continuum racy in the NIR domain.
the spectra will be important when set- of the M3.25 star ECHAJ0843.3-1705
ting priorities for the laboratory work. increased the accuracy of the detection
of the signal from molecular hydrogen Data reduction and release
Nearby M dwarfs have recently come (v = 1–0 S(1)) at 2.122 µm by 10 %, with a
into focus for precise radial velocity stud- corresponding effect on the estimated The CRIRES–POP library of high S/N
ies to search for the lowest mass planets. mass of gas in the disc. Therefore, it is 1–5 µm spectra will allow for improve-
Their intrinsic faintness and variability also our intention to provide a library of ments in the general extraction and cali-
in the optical makes them ideal candi- template stars that may be used to cali- bration of CRIRES spectra, and will fos-
dates for search campaigns in the NIR. brate, and remove, continuum features ter intensive interaction with the CRIRES
The first successful studies have just from stellar photospheres that may mask pipeline developers at ESO. Key interest
been launched (e.g., Bean et al., 2009), faint spectral features which are the sub- comes from a strong improvement in the
but the choice of the optimal wavelength ject of a science programme. removal of telluric lines, as it opens up
%KTW@QAHSQ@QXTMHS
%KTW@QAHSQ@QXTMHS
6@UDKDMFSGML 6@UDKDMFSGML
Figure 2. CRIRES spectrum of the M3 giant star Figure 3. CRIRES spectrum (black line) of YY Psc
YY Psc (black line) taken at the reference wavelength taken at the reference wavelength 5114.0 nm. The
2308.7 nm, showing the prominent 2–0 band head of spectrum is dominated by lines of CO and includes
CO. The red line shows the telluric model spectrum interesting low excitation lines of 13C16O and 12C18O.
with lines mainly caused by water vapour and meth- The red line shows the telluric model spectrum with
ane fitted to the observed spectrum. lines caused by water vapour fitted to the observed
spectrum.
Nadine Neumayer 1 the black hole and the bulge probe lactic nuclei (AGN; Häring-Neumayer et
Michele Cappellari 2 very different scales. These facts indicate al., 2006). It resulted in a black hole mass
Paul van der Werf 3 that the formation of a massive black about a factor of three lower than previ-
Juha Reunanen 4 hole is an essential ingredient in the proc- ous measurements. However, with only
Hans-Walter Rix 5 ess of galaxy formation. four slit positions we were not able to
Tim de Zeeuw 1, 3 constrain fully the inclination angle of the
Richard Davies 6 modelled gas disc.
Centaurus A — a special case?
1
ESO At a distance of less than 4 Mpc An ideal combination
2
University of Oxford, United Kingdom NGC 5128 (Centaurus A, hereafter Cen A)
3
Sterrewacht Leiden, the Netherlands is the closest giant elliptical galaxy, With the arrival of SINFONI at the VLT,
4
Turku University, Finland the closest active galaxy and the closest the study of black holes in galaxy centres
5
Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, recent merger. Cen A hosts an active made a big leap forward. SINFONI pro-
Heidelberg, Germany galactic nucleus revealed by the pres- vides integral field spectroscopy at adap-
6
Max-Planck-Institut für extraterres- ence of a powerful radio and X-ray jet. tive optics (AO) resolution (Eisenhauer
trische Physik, Garching, Germany Although this is one of the nearest super- et al., 2003; Bonnet et al., 2004). An ideal
massive black holes, its mass was long combination for studying galaxy centres
under debate (see Neumayer, 2010, for in great detail! We obtained high signal-
The prominent radio galaxy Centau- a review). Recent stellar dynamical meas- to-noise 3D spectra in J-, H- and K-
rus A is the closest active galaxy and a urements and modelling by Silge et al. bands (see Figure 1) with two different
prime opportunity to study the central (2005) result in a black hole mass of spatial scales: (i) 0.250 × 0.125 arcsec-
supermassive black hole and its influ- 2.4 × 10 8 solar masses, in agreement with onds (250-milliarcsecond scale) with
ence on the environment in great detail. the gas dynamical study of Marconi et al. a field of view of 8 × 8 arcseconds, and
We used the near-infrared integral (2001), who found 2 × 10 8 solar masses (ii) 0.10 × 0.05 arcseconds (100-milliarc-
field spectrograph SINFONI to measure (although with a large error bar, depend- second scale) with a field of view of
Centaurus A’s black hole mass from ing mainly on the unconstrained inclina- 3.2 × 3.2 arcseconds. These spectra
both stellar and gas kinematics. This tion angle of the modelled gas disc). show a wealth of gas emission and stellar
study shows how the advance in ob- ab-sorption lines, and enabled us to
serving techniques and instrumentation This measurement of the black hole mass extract the morphology and kinematics
drive the field of black hole mass meas- placed Cen A almost an order of magni- for dif-ferent gas species (Figure 2)
urements, and concludes that adaptive tude above the MBH –s relation, and made as well as the stars, simultaneously. The
optics assisted integral field spectros- it one of the largest outliers to this rela- 100-milliarcsecond data have a spatial
copy is the key to identifying the effects tion. The question was whether this is an resolution of 0.12 arcseconds (full width
of the active galactic nucleus on the intrinsic property of Cen A or whether the at half maximum, FWHM) and comforta-
surrounding ionised gas. The best-fit ground-based seeing-limited observa- bly re-solve the sphere of influence of the
+1.7
black hole mass is MBH = 4.5 –1.0 × 107 MA tions were not sharp enough to resolve putative black hole.
(from H2 kinematics) and MBH = 5.5 ± the “sphere of influence” of Cen A’s black
3.0 × 107 MA (from stellar kinematics; hole. This is the radius where the black The SINFONI data reveal vividly how the
both with 3s errors). This is one of the hole dominates the gravitational poten- flux distribution and kinematics in the
cleanest gas versus star comparisons tial, and, according to the mass pre- gas change when going from high to low
of a black hole mass determination, and dicted from the MBH –s relation, would be excitation states. When comparing the
brings Centaurus A into agreement 0.3 arcseconds — not resolved by see- velocity fields of [Si vi], [Fe ii], and H2 (mid-
with the relation of black hole mass ver- ing-limited observations. dle panels in Figure 2), one notices that
sus galaxy stellar velocity dispersion. the velocity field of [Si vi] consists of two
major components: rotational motion
Adaptive optics to the rescue around the nucleus (marked with a cross)
During the last few years it has been real- and translational motion along the jet
ised that most, if not all, nearby lumi- In 2003 we embarked on a comprehen- direction (P.A. = 51°). The non-rotational
nous galaxies host a supermassive black sive study of the nucleus of Cen A using motion along the jet is less severe, but
hole in their nucleus, with masses in the the near-infrared imager and spectro still remarkable in [Fe ii]. The situation is
range of one million to ten billion solar graph NAOS–CONICA (NACO) at the VLT. different for molecular hydrogen: the kin-
masses. The black hole mass (MBH ) is Guiding on the dust-enshrouded nucleus ematics of H2 is completely dominated
tightly related to the mass or luminosity of with the unique infrared wavefront sen- by rotational motion. The molecular gas
the host stellar spheroid, or bulge, and sor that NACO possesses, we obtained seems to be well settled in a rotating
with the velocity dispersion s (called the images and long-slit spectra at or close disc around the black hole without suffer-
MBH –s relation) of the stars therein. to the diffraction limit of the VLT. This ing major distortions by the jet. For this
These correlations have an amazingly low study showed that adaptive optics actu- reason, we focus on H2 as the dynamical
scatter, perhaps surprisingly low, since ally works and is applicable to active ga- tracer for the central mass concentration.
that best match the observed data …and stellar kinematics Figure 2. Flux, velocity, and velocity dispersion
maps (left to right) of the [Si vi], [Fe ii], and molecular
(Figure 4). The best-fitting black hole mass
hydrogen line emission (top, middle, and bottom,
in our tilted-ring model to the H2 kinemat- For the stellar dynamical modelling, the respectively). Note the different morphology and
ics is MBH = 4.5 +1.7 7
–1.0 × 10 MA for a median integral field, high spatial resolution k inematics of the ionised gas ([Si vi] and [Fe ii]) vs. the
disc inclination of 34° ± 4° (error bars are SINFONI observations are essential to molecular gas.
given at the 3s level). tightly constrain the black hole mass
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MBH –s relation (Figure 6).
σ ±
γ Lessons learned
1
The development of the black hole mass
measurement in Cen A over the past
eight years reflects the advance in ob-
1DK@SHUDkTW
σ ±
γ Figure 3. Radial variation in the spectrum of Cen A
1
in the 100-milliarcsecond SINFONI observations.
Left-hand column: different panels show the ob-
served spectra (black solid line) obtained by co
adding the spectra of the spaxels contained within
circular annuli of radius R and one pixel width
1DK@SHUDkTW
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even dust-enshrouded galaxy nuclei Figure 4. Symmetrised velocity map (upper left) in residuals. The diamonds correspond to the model
comparison to the model (upper middle; MBH = velocity curve while the asterisks correspond to
became accessible at a spatial resolution
4.5 + 1.7 × 107 MA, median disc inclination 34°). The the data. The agreement is very good along the line
of 0.1 arcseconds. This becomes even residual (data-model) is shown in the upper right of nodes. The mismatch in data and model for radii
more powerful when combined with inte- panel. The velocity curves in the bottom panels are beyond r ~ 1.7 arcseconds is likely due to the fact
gral field spectroscopy, as in SINFONI. extracted along the line-of-nodes (overplotted on that the inclination angle of the modelled gas disc is
the velocity maps), and therefore represent the peak not well represented in the outermost parts. This
Mapping the gas and the stars in 3D
velocity curves; the three panels show the observed has no impact on the derived black hole mass (taken
allows the morphology and kinematics of and model points, the model points only and the from Neumayer et al., 2007).
different gas species, plus the stars, to
be compared directly and simultaneously. while the stellar kinematics should be signal-to-noise data are crucial to extract
Having this powerful tool in hand, the unchanged by this. However, the extrac- the stellar kinematics reliably down to
influence of the inner jet on the kinemat- tion of the stellar kinematics from the small radii. Cen A is indeed the closest
ics of the ionised gas in Cen A could spectral absorption features becomes AGN and at the same time it is very com-
be revealed, and, moreover, molecular increasingly difficult in the close vicinity of plex. Every leap in instrumentation devel-
hydrogen could be identified as the ideal the AGN, as the AGN continuum dilutes opment is likely to reveal more complex
gas tracer for the central gravitational the stellar absorption lines. This is the substructures. This warrants our con
potential. The physical state of the gas is main difference in the analysis of Silge et tinuous attention, in order to reveal intrin-
therefore very important when using al. (2005) and Cappellari et al. (2009). sic properties in the data and under-
it as a tracer for the dynamical models. While Silge et al. (2005) first subtract stand shortcomings in the models that
The decrease of the value of the black the AGN contribution and then fit the stel- aim to predict the observations.
hole mass from Marconi et al. (2001) to lar line-of-sight-velocity distribution,
Neumayer et al. (2007) was due to the Cappellari et al. (2009) include the fit of
increase in spatial resolution, plus the the AGN continuum in the extraction of Acknowledgements
fact that the kinematic tracer changed the stellar kinematics. This is a very inter- Nadine Neumayer acknowledges support from the
from ionised gas to molecular hydrogen. esting lesson that we learned from DFG Cluster of Excellence, Origin and Structure
Cen A, and we should be cautious when of the Universe. Michele Cappellari acknowledges
The presence of an AGN can definitely extracting kinematics from other, more support from an STFC Advanced Fellowship (PP/
D005574/1).
influence the kinematics of the gas, distant objects. We also learned that high
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Figure 5 (left). Data-model comparison for the best-
fitting three-integral model. Top two panels: the top
row shows the bisymmetrised and linearly interpo-
lated 100-milliarcsecond SINFONI data. The second
row shows the best-fitting dynamical model predic-
tions. The central bins that were excluded from
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Mark Swinbank 1 Massive galaxies in the early Universe background galaxies to be strongly
Alastair Edge 1 have been shown to be forming stars amplified and stretched, providing us with
Johan Richard 1 at surprisingly high rates. The most prom- the opportunity of studying young and
Ian Smail 1 inent examples are sub-millimetre galax- intrinsically faint galaxies with a spatial
Carlos De Breuck 2 ies (SMGs) whose star formation rates resolution that cannot be attained via
Andreas Lundgren 2 can exceed 1000 MA year –1 (Chapman conventional observations. The natural
Giorgio Siringo 2 et al., 2003; Coppin et al., 2008). With amplification caused by the galaxy cluster
Axel Weiss 3 this intense star formation rate, a massive has two effects: (i) the image of the back-
Andrew Harris 4 galaxy (comparable to the stellar mass ground galaxy is magnified at a fixed sur-
Andrew Baker 5 of a local elliptical galaxy) can be built in face brightness (i.e. the total brightness is
Steve Longmore 6 just 100 million years (Tacconi et al., increased); and, (ii) the galaxy is not only
Rob Ivison 7 2008). As such, the sub-mm galaxy pop- amplified, but it is also stretched, mak-
ulation may represent the formation ing it possible to spatially resolve compo-
epoch of today’s massive elliptical galax- nents of the galaxy from the ground.
1
Institute for Computational Cosmology, ies (Lilly et al., 1999; Smail et al., 1997).
Department of Physics, University of
Durham, United Kingdom This is, however, a theoretically provoca- LABOCA imaging of distant clusters
2
ESO tive conclusion as it is at odds with theo-
3
Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastrono retical models. Indeed, sophisticated gal- During recent Atacama Pathfinder Ex-
mie, Bonn, Germany axy formation models have had to alter periment (APEX) 870-µm observations of
4
Department of Astronomy, University of their prescriptions for starbursts radically, a massive galaxy cluster (MACS 2135-
Maryland, College Park, USA invoking exotic physics such as strong 0102) we serendipitously discovered an
5
Department of Physics and Astronomy, variations in the stellar initial mass func- extremely bright sub-mm galaxy with
Rutgers University, Piscataway, USA tion in order to account for the SMG pop- an 870-µm flux of 106 mJy (see Figure 1,
6
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro- ulation (Baugh et al., 2004). Although left). This is three times brighter than any
physics, Cambridge, USA controversial, there is growing evidence other known high-redshift star-forming
7
United Kingdom Astronomy Technology that the increased interstellar medium galaxy and even brighter than the Clover-
Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland (ISM) pressure within the warm, dense leaf and APM08279 quasars. Due to the
gas in local ultra-luminous infrared galax- high significance of the source, we were
ies (ULIRGs) results in an increased able to centroid the sub-mm emission to
The discovery and subsequent follow- Jeans mass (Perez-Torres et al., 2009). In an accuracy of less than 0.5 arcseconds
up of one of the brightest sub-mm gal- order to test these controversial prescrip- and identify the mid-infrared counterpart
axies discovered so far is presented. tions, direct observational constraints with a bright source detected by the
First identified with the LABOCA instru- on the properties of individual star-forming Spitzer Space Telescope Infra-Red Array
ment on APEX in May 2009, this galaxy regions within high redshift galaxies Camera (IRAC) and Multiband Imaging
lies at z = 2.32 and its brightness of are necessary. Such observations are Photometer (MIPS); see Figure 1 right.
106 mJy at 870 µm is due to the gravita- technologically challenging, requiring the Due to the brightness, we were able to
tional magnification caused by a mas- increased collecting area and sensitivity obtain a redshift measurement for the
sive intervening galaxy cluster. Follow- of the next generation telescopes, such galaxy of z = 2.3259 via the blind detec-
up observations with APEX SABOCA as the Extremely Large Telescopes tion of CO(1–0) using the Zpectrometer
have been used to constrain the far- currently being planned and the Atacama on the Green Bank Telescope (GBT),
infrared spectral energy distribution and Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array confirming that the galaxy is high redshift
hence measure the star formation rate, (ALMA) under construction. Moreover, and strongly gravitationally lensed.
and Swedish Heterodyne Facility Instru- since the most intensely star-forming gal- Indeed, using a detailed mass model of
ment observations help constrain the axies are also the most obscured, they the galaxy cluster we derive an amplifica-
excitation of the cold molecular gas. are optically faint and difficult to identify tion factor of 32.5 ± 4.5. Intrinsically
Furthermore, high resolution follow-up and study on sub-kiloparsec (sub-kpc) therefore the 870-µm flux is ~ 3 mJy, typi-
with the sub-mm array resolves the scales. cal of the sub-mm background, and, on
star-forming regions on scales of just account of the amplification, an ideal tar-
100 parsecs. These results allow study get for study. The CO(1–0) emission line
of galaxy formation and evolution at a Gravitational lensing flux can also be used to estimate the cold
level of detail never before possible and molecular gas mass; after correcting
provide a glimpse of the exciting pos The most promising route for investigat- for lensing amplification we derive a gas
sibilities for future studies of galaxies ing the properties of high redshift galax- mass of 2 × 1010 MA.
at these early times, particularly with ies on sub-kpc scales is to use massive
ALMA. galaxy clusters as natural lenses. Galaxy
clusters magnify the images of distant
galaxies that serendipitously lie behind
them. This natural magnification causes
σ
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Figure 1. True colour HST VI-band image of the mas-
sive galaxy cluster MACSJ2135-0102 (zcl = 0.325) Y
is shown (left). The white contours denote the APEX/ + ANK
+
LABOCA 870-µm contours from the galaxy (con-
tours denote 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30s), identifying
an SMG with flux 106 mJy. The solid red lines denote
the z = 2.326 radial and tangential critical curves
from the best-fit lens model. The true colour
IRAC 3.6, 4.5, 8.0-µm image of the cluster core is
shown (right). The contours denote the intensity of
the 350-µm map and show 5, 10, 15, 20s. The
red lines again show the lens model critical curves.
%KTWCDMRHSXL)X
,
SABOCA
QO
With confirmation that this is a highly am-
plified background galaxy, observations
at 350 µm using the SABOCA camera
(see article by Siringo et al., p. 20) were
3C *
nosity of 1.2 × 1012 LA. This suggests a
star formation rate of 210 MA/yr. If this
6@UDKDMFSG§L
star formation rate has been maintained,
then it takes just ~ 120 Myr to build the
observed stellar mass of 4 × 1010 MA and Figure 2. Spectral energy distribution (SED) of the denotes the best fit modified blackbody to the pho-
lensed galaxy SMMJ2135-0102 is shown. To test tometry. Accounting for lensing amplification, the
the remaining gas depletion timescale
how the SED of the galaxy compares to local star- bolometric luminosity of the galaxy is L bol = 1.2 ± 0.2
is a further 70 Myr. Together, this sug- bursts, the SEDs of M82 (blue dashed line) and × 1012 LA which corresponds to a star formation rate
gests that this intense star formation epi- Arp220 (red dashed line), both arbitrarily scaled to of SFR = 210 ± 50 MA/yr.
sode may be the first major growth phase the 1.2 mm flux, are overlaid. The solid black line
of this galaxy.
( BN)". l
parameter, and we are therefore able
to estimate the size of each component
indirectly. The SLED modelling suggests
that both the “red” and “blue” compo-
$ '
Figure 4a. The SMA map of SMMJ2135-0102 show- Figure 4b. The spatial distribution of the four compo-
ing the image-plane morphology of the lensed galaxy nents in the image plane from the lens model are
Outlook
at 870 µm. The galaxy comprises eight individual shown. Each of the components (A, B, C and D),
components, separated by up to 4 arcseconds in which are mirrored about the lensing critical curve,
projection. The z = 2.326 radial critical curve (red line) are identified. Overall, these results provide unique
is overlaid. The beam size is shown (lower right). insight into the physics of star formation
within a galaxy at z ~ 2 on scales that
would otherwise only be achieved with
2,,) the increased light grasp and resolution
QO of the next generation of facilities, such
&H@MS,NKDBTK@Q"KNTCR
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glimpse of two of the three science driv-
ers for ALMA: to provide images at an
angular resolution of 0.1 arcsecond of the
dust continuum from distant galaxies;
+ ¨L6'Y
References
2HYDOB Baugh, C. M. et al. 2004, MNRAS, 69, 3101
Caldwell, D. A. et al. 1996, ApJ, 472, 611
Chapman, S. C. et al. 2005, ApJ, 622, 772
Figure 5. Correlation between size and luminosity for to dense GMC cores, but with lumino Coppin, K. E. K. et al. 2008, MNRAS, 384, 1597
star-forming regions in SMMJ2135-0102 compared Hill, T. et al. 2005, MNRAS, 363, 405
sities 107 times larger. Thus, it is likely Lilly, S. et al. 1999, ApJ, 518, 641
to those in the Milky Way and local galaxies. Black
squares denote the size and 260-µm luminosities that each of the star-forming regions in Livanou, E. et al. 2006, A&A, 451, 431
of giant molecular clouds in the Milky Way and the SMMJ2135-0102 comprises ~ 107 dense Perez-Torres, M. A. et al. 2009, A&A, 507, L17
local group. The lower dashed line shows a fit to this GMC cores. Sakamoto, N. et al. 2008, ApJ, 684, 957
relation (with slope fixed at L 260 µ ∝ r 3; i.e. constant Scoville, N. et al. 1989, ApJ, 339, 149
energy density). The solid red points denote the Smail, I. et al. 1997, ApJL, 490, 5
sizes and luminosities of the star-forming regions in The luminosity (and therefore star forma- Snell, R. L. et al. 2002, ApJ, 578, 229
SMMJ2135-0102. The sizes and luminosities of tion) density of the star-forming regions Swinbank, A. M. et al. 2010, Nature (in press)
dense cores of galactic GMCs in Henize 2-10 and within SMMJ2135-0102 are also similar Tacconi, L. et al. 2008, ApJ, 680, 246
M82 are plotted (open diamonds) as well as the two Weiss, A. et al. 2005, A&A, 440, 45
to those found in the highest density re-
dominant star-forming regions within the local ultra-
luminous infrared galaxy Arp220 (blue triangles). gions of the local starburst galaxy Arp220 Further images in Press Release eso1012.
Leonardo Testi 1 are also a key theme for the James Webb and young planetary systems. The high
Ewine van Dishoeck 2, 3 Space Telescope (JWST) and the Euro- level of attendance (the meeting was
pean Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). substantially oversubscribed) and lively
discussions following the talks and at
1
ESO The workshop was organised with the the poster sessions are a testimony to
2
eiden Observatory, Leiden University,
L goals of reviewing the status of the field the maturity and the high rate of progress
the Netherlands and discussing transformational pro- of the field (see Figure 1). The frequent
3
Max-Planck-Institut für extraterres- grammes that will be made possible with reference in the talks to the prospects of
trische Physik, Garching, Germany the upcoming facilities, and especially by Herschel, ALMA and in the more distant
the combined use of present and future future, JWST and E-ELT observations, re-
ESO facilities. To achieve these goals the affirmed the key role of these facilities
A summary of the joint ESO/MPE/ workshop brought together the commu- for the studies of disks and the formation
MPA/LMU workshop “From Circumstel- nities working with ground-based infrared of planetary systems. Most of the 53 talks
lar Disks to Planetary Systems” is pre- large telescopes and interferometers, presented are available on the workshop
sented. The meeting reviewed the sta- with space observatories and millimetre web pages1. Here we briefly summa-
tus of our observational and theoretical interferometers, as well as theorists and rise only a few of the many new results
understanding of protoplanetary disks, modellers. The second half of 2009 was presented at the conference.
from the formation phase through their chosen for the workshop on account of
evolution to planet formation and debris the perfect timing to: discuss observa-
disks. tional programmes to be carried out with Selected results
ALMA during Early Science; review the
survey results from Spitzer and other The formation and properties of disks
The study of circumstellar disks and the large field facilities; present the new high during the early stages of star formation,
formation of planetary systems has ex- angular and spectral resolution results the so-called Class 0 phase, were dis-
perienced enormous progress in recent that are coming from the ESO VLT/VLTI; cussed in the framework of recent
years. Thanks to wide field imaging sur- view the first glimpses of the potential Spitzer, Sub-Millimeter Array (SMA) and
veys with the Spitzer Space Telescope of Herschel. Indeed, this workshop distin- Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique
and ground-based near-infrared and sub- guished itself from other recent meetings (IRAM) Plateau de Bure interferometer
millimetre telescopes, unbiased samples in the field by covering the full span (PdBI) results. The observations clearly
of thousands of young stellar objects with of observational facilities (rather than just show that compact flattened structures
disk luminosities down to 0.01 LA (the one specific instrument or wavelength) are formed in the very early stages of
brown dwarf regime) have been identified and by having a healthy mix of observa- collapsing protostellar envelopes. The
in the nearest molecular clouds within tions and models. exact nature of these compact sources
~ 1 kiloparsec. Photometry from optical to and their theoretical interpretation are
millimetre wavelengths provides spectral The workshop covered all the phases still debated, as current observations
energy distributions whereas mid-infrared of the lifetime of disks: from disk forma- cannot fully distinguish the “pseudodisk”
and submillimetre spectroscopy probes tion, the role of disks in the formation
the gas and the solid state content. The and early evolution of stars, disk evolution Figure 1. Workshop participants photographed
ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its including planet formation, debris disks outside the MPE seminar room.
interferometer (VLTI) in the optical/infra-
red, combined with millimetre and radio
interferometers at longer wavelengths,
are providing a wealth of high angular res-
olution observations to study disk struc-
ture and evolution. New and exciting
developments range from evidence for
grain growth and settling (the first steps in
planet formation) as the disks evolve, to
the development of gaps and holes in
a new set of transitional disks, and to the
direct detection of (proto-)planets around
pre-main sequence stars. New facilities
with enormous potential are lining up and
are expected to start producing a wealth
of new data: the Herschel Space Observ-
atory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/
submillimeter Array (ALMA) with the
opening of Early Science in 2011. In the
more distant future, protoplanetary disks
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Figure 2. High angular resolution submillimetre con- high sensitivity and high angular resolu- through in this area and should be
tinuum images of three transitional disks obtained
tion observations of the gaseous com within the capabilities of ALMA and the
at the SMA (Brown et al., 2009). The high angular
resolution images reveal an inner region of the disk ponent of the disk. Winds and accretion Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA).
where the dust column density is much lower than represent an alternative indirect probe
in classical disks, possibly a result of disk evolution, of the inner regions of disks and several The last part of the meeting was dedi-
which could be caused by photoevaporation, vis-
new results in these areas were discussed cated to young (exo-)planetary systems,
cous evolution or clearing by young protoplanets.
at the meeting. debris disks and the dynamical interac-
tions between planets and dust in young
The evolution of the solid and gaseous planetary systems. A handful of direct
predicted by models of collapsing mag- components of the disks towards the for- detections of planetary mass compan-
netised clouds from the classical flat mation of planets was the other major ions to nearby stars were presented (see
accretion disks. Key tests of the differ- subject discussed by many theoretical example in Figure 4) and the interactions
ent models will soon be made possible and observational talks (see for example between these bodies and the debris
by observing the kinematics of these Figure 3). Millimetre-wave continuum disks in these systems were discussed
compact structures using ALMA to observations of disks now show convinc- in the framework of dynamical evolution
detect and image rare molecular species. ing evidence for the presence of large models. The sophistication reached
(mm–cm size) grains in the outer regions by the dynamical interaction models was
The discussion of the statistics, diversity, (radii ~ 100 AU) of protoplanetary disks. discussed in several talks. Indeed, the
chemical and physical properties of These findings challenge the theoreti- variety of observed debris disk morphol-
disks around pre-main sequence stars cal predictions of dust fragmentation and ogies could be explained by these mod-
occupied a large fraction of the meeting. migration and most likely require some els using reasonable values for the mass
The power of Spitzer as a survey tele- form of trapping of large grains in small and orbits of the planetary bodies. In ad-
scope was demonstrated by the results areas of the disk; a few possible mech dition, population synthesis models of
presented for several star-forming anisms to achieve this trapping were pre- planetary systems have reached a level of
regions. It is now well established that sented. Resolving grain growth proper- complexity that now allows for a detailed
disks with similar properties surround ties at millimetre wavelengths across comparison of the properties of exoplan-
young stellar objects with masses rang- disks is going to produce a major break- ets with the observed distributions.
ing from brown dwarfs to a few solar
masses, and even more massive stars
.OGHTBTR"(((
are found to be associated with disks, 3@TQTR"(((
albeit with different properties and life-
"( Figure 3. Dust opacity power law
times. Much work is being invested in (2,
index as a function of age for a large
the characterisation of the non-classical sample of disks around isolated
pre-main sequence stars in Taurus
disks in an attempt to understand their and Ophiuchus (red and blue points
nature and possible relationship with disk respectively) and for a small sample
Nuno Santos 1 A short report on the workshop aimed In order to enable the discovery and
Claudio Melo 2 at exploring the role of the Extremely characterisation of other Earths, a new
Luca Pasquini 2 Large Telescopes in finding and charac- generation of instruments and tele-
Andreas Glindeman 2 terising Earth-like planets is presented. scopes is now being conceived and built
by different teams around the world. With
the large diameter of their primary mir-
1
entro de Astrofísica, Universidade do
C The Centro de Astrofísica da Universi- rors, the new generation of ELTs will
Porto, Portugal dade do Porto hosted an ESO-sponsored play a crucial role in this research and the
2
ESO conference, which had the main goal detection of Earth-mass planets is ex-
of understanding how Extremely Large pected to be within reach.
telescopes (ELTs) will help in finding
and characterising other Earth-like plan- In parallel, a new generation of instru-
ets, as well the challenges that we have ments for current 8 to 10-metre-class
to overcome to achieve this goal. facilities is being planned. The new cut-
acterisation. We heard that the main Small M dwarfs may be particularly good and variability. The advent of the ELTs will
purpose of the ELTs will not include the targets for transit searches, but new gen- certainly open the way to new exciting
search for planets using astrometry, erations of stable spectrographs will also science in this field, and may even allow
microlensing or photometric transit tech- allow the discovery of “exo-Earths” orbit- the detection of biosignatures in the
niques (although follow-up using these ing K and M dwarfs. atmospheres of exo-Earths. The difficulty
methods is certainly envisaged). How- of modelling the atmospheres of exo-
ever, a lot is expected from radial velocity Most of Thursday was dedicated to dis- Earths was presented; however it was
and direct imaging, and even the charac- cussion of the challenges and progress suggested that in this field observations
terisation of their atmospheres is a goal. achieved towards the direct detection of will lead the theoretical findings.
Earth-like planets with ELTs. We learned
Following the Tuesday afternoon social that although it will be a difficult task, a Overall, the exceptional quality of the
programme, which included a visit to number of promising extreme AO instru- talks contributed to make this a great
the famous Porto wine cellars and a boat ments are being planned that will allow conference, where many different ideas
tour on the River Douro, the Wednes- direct images of planets orbiting other were presented and discussed. We
day sessions focused on the technical solar-type stars to be made. would thus like to deeply thank the scien-
and astrophysical limitations to the detec- tific organising committee, the local
tion of other planets using the radial organising committee and all the partici-
velocity, photometric transit and astro- Session 3: Exo-Earth characterisation pants for making this a memorable event.
metric techniques. Both the instrumental
and astrophysical aspects are provid- The final session began late on Thursday, All the talks will be available (both in video
ing significant developments. Although opening the window on an impressive and in pdf format) on the website1 of the
stellar intrinsic phenomena and even the number of results showing how the direct conference and a DVD will be sent to all
existence of multi-planet systems pose detection and characterisation of exo- the participants.
some difficulties to the detection of other atmospheres is a fast-growing field. It is
Earths, a general consensus exists that already possible to identify molecules
it will be possible to detect Earth-type in exoplanet atmospheres, to detect day Links
planets in the habitable zones of solar- and night temperature gradients, and to 1
http://www.astro.up.pt/toe2009
type stars (spectral types G, K and M). find evidence for atmospheric escape
Chris Lidman 1, 2 Galaxy clusters are the most massive such as the amount of matter in the Uni-
Michael West 1 bound structures in the Universe. The verse, the equation of state of the myste-
most massive examples contain thou- rious dark energy and the primordial
sands of galaxies and are about a power spectrum of density fluctuations.
1
ESO thousand times more massive than our
2
nglo Australian Observatory, Epping,
A own Milky Way. Since clusters can be For these reasons, the search for distant
Australia detected from a time when the Universe galaxy clusters is currently a very active
was only a few billion years old all the field, with the number of known distant
way to present day, they serve as unique clusters or proto-clusters increasing rap-
A workshop bringing together theoreti- laboratories for studying environmen- idly. The detection of distant clusters of
cians and observational astronomers tal influences on galaxy formation and galaxies is challenging because methods
from different wavebands to discuss the evolution. If we look back far enough that have traditionally worked well —
current knowledge of galaxy clusters is we should be able to see clusters, and the such as the detection of the X-ray emis-
briefly summarised. galaxies within them, forming. Moreover, sion from the hot intracluster gas or
the number density of galaxy clusters optical imaging to detect clusters as
is sensitive to cosmological parameters, enhancements in the projected galaxy
Participants at the workshop with the smoking astronomers working at different wave- In view of the rapid progress that has
Volcán Villarrica in the background. been made in this field and the number
lengths to summarise the current state of
knowledge of galaxy clusters. of cluster conferences that will be held
distribution — become much less effi- during 2010, the proceedings will only be
cient as one goes to greater distances. The conference was held over four days made available from the conference web-
Nevertheless, a variety of techniques, in the Gran Hotel Pucón, which is situ- site1. By the time this Messenger report
including optical, infrared and X-ray sur- ated on the shore of the beautiful Lake appears, all the presentations and some
veys, as well as surveys based on the Villarrica. A fifth day was kept free for of the first papers will be available.
Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, have identified participants to explore the region and to
a growing number of clusters in the early participate in some of the adventurous
Universe. Alternative methods, such activities that are on offer in this part Acknowledgements
as the use of powerful radio galaxies and of Chile. Quite a few of the participants The workshop would not have been possible without
quasars as beacons for locating high- climbed Volcán Villarrica, an active vol- the guidance of the scientific organising committee,
redshift clusters, are also providing prom- cano that dominates the Pucón skyline. the dedicated, efficient and friendly support of
ising new ways to identify and study the The volcano can be seen behind the par- Daniel Asmus, María Eugenia Gómez, Paulina Jirón,
Ricardo Salinas, and Jean Siefken, and of course
most distant galaxy clusters. ticipants in the conference photo. the participants, who travelled such a long way to
attend.
With this motivation, ESO organised a About 100 participants attended the
workshop in the resort town of Pucón in workshop. Over the four days of the
Links
Southern Chile with the goal of bringing conference, there were about 60 talks,
together theoreticians and observational of which eight were invited reviews, and 1
http://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/GCEU2009/
Leonardo Testi 1 ble progress. Following conditional ac- fringes and closure phase was achieved
ceptance of the first antenna at the by the ALMA Assembly Integration and
beginning of 2009, first fringes with two Verification (AIV) team (see ESO Press
1
ESO antennas were achieved at the Oper Release eso1001).
ations Support Facility (OSF at 2900 m
altitude) after a few months (see The Following the successful checks on the
It is an exciting time for the Atacama Messenger, 137, 17). Later in the year, three antenna interferometers and the
Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array three antennas were transported to the deployment of the latest version of the
(ALMA). Following the shift of the focus of Array Operations Site (AOS, at 5000 m), ALMA software system, on 22 January
the testing activities from the ALMA Test where fringes were achieved with two 2010, the ALMA project has officially
Facility in Socorro, New Mexico (see The antennas at submillimetre wavelengths. entered the Commissioning and Science
Messenger, 135, 61) to Chile at the end of Finally, towards the end of the year three Verification (CSV) phase. The goal for
2008, the project has seen truly remarka- antennas were linked together and stable 2010 is to deliver the hardware, software
/G@RD
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Figure 1 (above). The three ALMA antennas on Figure 2 (right). Test of closure phase with three
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Chajnantor working as an interferometer. The antennas at AOS. The upper three panels show the
APEX telescope is also visible in the background. phase as measured on each of the three baselines l
and perform the necessary tests to allow This progress has been made possible the start of CSV activities, as well as by
a release of the first call for proposals for by the many people intent on keeping to the tireless efforts of the ALMA AIV and
Early Science observations with ALMA. the schedule for the hardware and soft- CSV teams led by Joe McMullin and
ware deliveries for the closure phase and Richard Hills.
held at the I. Physikalisches Institut, Universität zu Köln, Germany, 5–7 October 2009
Leonardo Testi1 scientific areas by providing an unprece- and atomic line frequencies and strengths,
Peter Schilke 2 dented quantity and quality of high spatial collision rates, dust properties, etc.
Crystal Brogan 3 and spectral resolution (sub)millimetre While producing the models themselves
wavelength spectral line data. These data is a science activity, adapting them for
will allow detailed observational tests use with ALMA data, and making them
1
ESO of astronomical models of astrochemistry, available to a larger community (including
2
I. Physikalisches Institut, Universität zu star and planet formation, galaxy forma- testing, documentation, etc.) is not. This
Köln, Germany tion and evolution, and many others. The latter is especially critical since one of the
3
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, high quality ALMA data will allow much goals for ALMA is to be easily useable
Charlottesville, USA more stringent comparison between by the wider astronomical community and
observations and models than has been not to be restricted only to experts in mil-
possible with data from current instru- limetre and radio interferometry.
A summary of a workshop bringing ments. Nevertheless, to achieve this, the
together laboratory physicists, chemists models (e.g., chemical network models, In order to optimise the science output
and astronomers to discuss the needs radiative transfer programmes, etc.) need from ALMA, there is therefore a need
and strategies for developing common to be of commensurate quality. Addi to produce and gather ancillary data and
approaches to data and models for tionally, given the expected ALMA data make them available to ALMA users, as
ALMA is presented. production rates, easy and perhaps in well as adapting and making available sci-
novative ways of comparing and visualis- entific models for use by the ALMA com-
ing models and data must be available. munity at large. While some efforts along
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillim- The models need to have access to fun- these lines exist, such as the Cologne
eter Array (ALMA) will revolutionise many damental physical data, such as molecular Database for Molecular Spectroscopy
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The workshop “Data Needs for ALMA”,
organised with the sponsorship of Radio-
net and the major ALMA partners, ESO,
the National Radio Astronomy Observa-
tory (NRAO) and the National Astronomi-
cal Observatory of Japan (NOAJ), was
dedicated to the discussion of the above 1DRSEQDPTDMBX&'Y
topics. The workshop brought together
laboratory physicists, chemists, and as
tronomers as providers of data and mod- molecular cores surrounding forming Figure 1. Example of SMA hot core spectra from
three massive star-forming cores separated by less
els, together with astronomers as cus- low- and high-mass stars. With a fraction
than 5000 AU in NGC 6334I, showing the richness
tomers, to discuss data and modeling of the bandwidth and sensitivity of the of molecular species and the large fraction of un
needs and strategies for developing com- future ALMA observations, we are already identified lines (Brogan et al., in preparation).
mon databases both of physical data detecting not only a variety of molecular
and models for use with ALMA data. The lines that require proper chemical model-
programme and many of the talks are ling, but a large fraction of emission fea- cies; collisional and reaction rates; and
available1. tures from molecular species that are not numerical codes to integrate these data
yet identified (see example in Figure 1). with proper source modelling and radia-
tion transfer. One of the major problems,
Workshop topics The need for the development of ad which is especially critical for groups
vanced chemical models, which have to performing laboratory measurements or
The workshop opened with a summary include the treatment of fractionation running theoretical computations to
of the status of ALMA construction and a of different isotopic species, for at least provide data for astrophysical modelling,
summary of the plans for ALMA Early the most common atoms and molecules, is the recognition of their “service” work
Science and user support software and was evident from observations of mole- and long-term funding for these efforts.
databases. ALMA will provide software cules such as CCS, 13CCS and C13CS It was also recognised that new software
to support the various phases of observ- that were presented at the meeting. interfaces that allow easy access to the
ing programme preparation, from pro- These observations show different abun- different existing databases, while allow-
posal submission (Phase 1) to Scheduling dance ratios for the isotopologues than ing a more efficient use of the obser
Block preparation (Phase 2), pipeline predicted in current chemical models vational data, can introduce an additional
and offline data reduction software, which, of molecular clouds. In addition, the im divide between the catalogue producers
together with the widespread user sup- portance of proper modelling of source and the astronomers, making it even
port through the ALMA Regional Centres, structure, and its impact on the chemical more difficult to provide the proper recog-
will allow ALMA users to plan for their structure, the radiation transfer, and nition for the catalogue contributors and
observations and produce quality-assured ultimately the observed spectrum of the providers. As an additional difficulty,
data cubes (“ALMA images”) ready for observed sources, was emphasised in most of the physical and chemical experi-
scientific analysis. The need for advanced several talks. ments and computations required by
analysis tools and catalogues for proper the astronomers are not always consid-
exploitation of ALMA data was clearly A number of areas were identified as ered as the highest priority for funding
demonstrated with Institut de Radioastro requiring significant additional resources in their own field. It was thus recognised
nomie Millimétrique (IRAM) and SubMilli- including: laboratory measurements and that the laboratory and computational
meter Array (SMA) observations of the theoretical calculations of line frequen- work needed for astrophysical purposes
Christopher Erdmann1 web. The project involved scanning and search functions are now available on
roughly the first 80 issues of The Messen- the ESO Messenger webpage for all
ger for which there were no electronic issues from the first, in May 1974, to the
1
ESO copies available. In some cases, original present.
copies were obtained from retired staff
or from the ESO library in Chile. The Behind the scenes, the journal publication
As part of a new ESO initiative, under greater task, however, required the addi- process for The Messenger is now han-
the direction of the ESO Library, all ESO tion, correction and migration of over dled through a new electronic publishing
Messenger content from 1974 to the 3500 records to a database management platform called Marathon. Through Mara-
present is now fully available on the ESO system. As a result, improved browsing thon, the Messenger editor and layout
and graphic artists can now manage the Figure 1. The ESO web
page with access to
publication workflow and publish the
back copies and con-
completed Messenger issues directly to tent of The Messenger.
the web. Metadata for The Messenger can
now be easily exchanged through Mara-
thon automatically with the Astrophysics
Database System (ADS), the primary liter-
ature search tool for astronomers world-
wide. Thus author and title information
are available in ADS for all Messenger arti-
cles together with access to the full text.
The Messenger digitisation and archiving Eugenia Gómez, under the direction of Links
project is a result of the hard work and the author. Future developments will be 1
he Messenger: http://www.eso.org/sci/
T
support of Marco Schilk of InduPrint, Lee under the direction of Lars Holm Nielsen, publications/messenger
Pullen, Jeremy Walsh, Jutta Boxheimer, Web & Advanced Projects Coordinator 2
Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/
Uta Grothkopf, Martin Cullum, and María for ePOD.
Daniel Bramich sult can be important, and the thrust of and the algorithms and data used to
my thesis was the calculation of limits on carry out the science, which also suits
I am a mathematician turned astronomer. the hot Jupiter planet fraction in the my strong mathematical background.
I studied maths at Christ’s College, open cluster NGC 7789. Today I am still
Cambridge, from 1997–2000, specialising looking for a transiting planet of my own, Yearning for some more sun, I spent the
with my last year in theoretical astrophys- and although many have been discov- next three years back on La Palma as
ics. Not convinced I was ready for a ered, they still elude me! a Support Astronomer for the ING, where
PhD, I spent a year working as a student I expanded my observing experience
support astronomer at the Isaac Newton My life seemed to go backwards and with the large suite of instruments availa-
Group (ING) in La Palma, Canary Islands. forwards between the Canary Islands and ble at the WHT. My research time was
The time on La Palma sparked my inter- the UK, from the sun to the clouds and invested in the technique of difference
est in data reduction algorithms and back again! The last year of my PhD imaging, and I developed a new method
observational techniques, which became (2004) was spent in Tenerife, and I subse- for matching the point spread function
an essential part of my work during my quently carried out short contractual between two images, with minimal as-
PhD, which I carried out under the super- postdocs at St Andrews, Liverpool John sumptions about the shape of the match-
vision of Keith Horne in St Andrews. The Moores University and Cambridge Uni- ing convolution kernel. The method is
result of my PhD thesis was a non-result, versity (2005–2006). By the end of these now starting to prove more robust than
in that I was looking for a transiting planet periods it was clear that my interests the traditional method, and my imple
and did not find any. However, a null re- and work concentrate on both science mentation is now part of an automatic
Fellows at ESO
Our knowledge of spiral arms in the cilitate an in-depth discussion of the spi- (ALMA), Delphine Russeil (Observatoire
Milky Way and the kinematics in the Solar ral structure in the Milky Way. de Marseille).
Neighbourhood has increased signifi-
cantly over the last few decades. Despite The main topics will be: The workshop is planned for 3.5 days
these advances, there is still no con – Tracers of spiral arms in the Milky Way with four sessions for each of the full
sensus on basic parameters of the spiral at any wavelength days. The first three sessions will contain
structure in our Galaxy, such as the num- – K inematic indicators of the spiral pat- long reviews (40 + 5 m) and some
ber of major spiral arms and their loca- tern in our Galaxy contributed talks (15 + 5 m). The last ses-
tion, the pattern speed(s) and amplitude, – Models and theory related to the Milky sion of each afternoon will be devoted
and the relation of the arms to the central Way spiral structure to discussions plus short summaries of
bar. Major new facilities (e.g., ALMA, – Estimates of parameters for the spiral selected posters. We aim for around
GAIA, LSST, VISTA and VST) will provide pattern in our Galaxy 50 participants with a maximum of 70 as
a wealth of data on the spatial and allowed by local facilities. Proposals for
k inematic distributions of material in the Scientific Organising Committee: both contributed talks and posters are
Galaxy. Thus, it seems appropriate to Yuri Beletski (ESO), Leonardo Bronfman invited. Students are particularly encour-
perform a census of the current data for (Universidad de Chile), Giovanni aged to apply.
confrontation with theory and models Carraro (ESO), Ortwin Gehrard (Max-
of spiral structure, and thereby map out Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Further details are available at http://
a path towards a consolidated view of Physik), Preben Grosbøl (ESO), Vladimir www.eso.org/sci/meetings/MW2010/.
the spiral pattern in the Milky Way. Korchagin (South Russia Federal Uni
versity), Jorge May (Universidad de Chile), The deadline for registration is
The workshop will bring together observ- Naomi McClure-Griffiths (Australia Tele- 6 June 2010.
ers and theoreticians, and thereby fa- scope National Facility), Lars-Åke Nyman
ESO
European Organisation
for Astronomical
Research in the
Southern Hemisphere
Students in the programme work on their doctoral project under All documents should be submitted in English (but no translation is
the formal supervision of their home university. They come to either required for the certificates and diplomas).
Garching or Santiago for a stay of normally between one and two
years to conduct part of their studies under the co-supervision of an Review of the received material, including the recommendation
ESO staff astronomer. Candidates and their home institute supervi- letters, will start on 15 June 2010. Applications arriving after this
sors should agree on a research project together with the ESO local deadline will be considered until all the positions are filled.
supervisor. A list of potential ESO supervisors and their research Incomplete applications will not be considered. All reference let-
interests can be found at http://www.eso.org/sci/activities/personnel. ters must be sent electronically to vacancy@eso.org.
html. A list of current PhD projects offered by ESO staff is available at
http://www.eso.org/sci/activities/thesis-topics/. It is highly recom- Candidates will be notified of the results of the selection process in
mended that the applicants start their PhD studies at their home insti- July 2010. Studentships typically begin between August and
tute before continuing their PhD work and developing their research December of the year in which they are awarded. In well-justified
projects at ESO. cases, starting dates in the year following the application can be
negotiated.
ESO Chile students will have an opportunity to visit the observato-
ries and to get involved in small projects aimed at giving insights into For further information please contact Christina Stoffer (cstoffer@
the observatory operations. eso.org).
In Garching students may attend, if desired, and benefit from the Although recruitment preference will be given to nationals of ESO
series of lectures given to the PhD students enrolled in the IMPRS Member States (members are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Repub-
(International Max-Planck Research School on Astrophysics) PhD lic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands,
programme. Students who are already enrolled in a PhD programme Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom) no
in the Munich area (e.g., the IMPRS or at a Munich University) and nationality is in principle excluded.
wish to apply for an ESO studentship in Garching, should provide
compelling justification for their application. The post is open equally to suitably qualified male and female appli-
cants.
The Outline of the Terms of Service for Students (http://www.eso.
org/public/employment/student.html) provides some more details
on employment conditions and benefits.
The goal of the fourth High Time Resolu- (XMM, CHANDRA, FERMI) and future
tion Astrophysics (HTRA) workshop is (e.g., IKO and SKA) observing facilities.
to explore the current and future state of
observations of all different types of The purpose is to create a unique oppor-
astronomical sources featuring variability tunity for interaction between the HTRA
at the second and/or subsecond time community and the wider astronomical
scales. The three-day workshop has community. This will stimulate discus-
been planned to offer the community the sions on the exploitation of the scientific
opportunity to present contributions in potential of future facilities, on the devel-
different thematic areas covering science, opment of their instrumentation, and on
instrumentation and future observing a number of technical and engineering
facilities. Selected science topics include: aspects related to their design and oper-
isolated neutron stars; X-ray binaries; ation.
white dwarfs and ultra-compact binary
systems; stellar oscillations; flare stars; Invited speakers include: Felix Aharonian
extragalactic transients (GRBs); and (Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies),
planet transits/occultations. Contributions Werner Becker (Max-Planck-Institut für ottfried Kanbach (Max-Planck-Institut
G
in other science topics related to the field extraterrestrische Physik), Tomaso Belloni für extraterrestrische Physik), Nikos
of HTRA are equally welcome. (INAF–Astronomical Observatory of Kylafis (University of Crete, FORTH), Tom
Brera, Merate), Vik Dhillon (University of Marsh (University of Warwick), Roberto
The focus of the HTRA-IV workshop is on Sheffield), Isobel Hook (University of Mignani (University College London–
optical studies in all of the above science Oxford), Michael Kramer (Jodrell Bank Mullard Space Science Laboratory), Andy
areas. In particular, the major empha- Centre for Astrophysics), George Pavlov Shearer (National University of Ireland,
sis will be on optical observations and on (Penn State University), Ron Remillard Galway), Aga Slowikowska (Institute of
the potential of HTRA with the next gen- (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Astronomy, University of Zielona Gora).
eration of Extremely Large Telescopes Andrea Richichi (ESO) and Jürgen
(like the European Extremely Large Tele- Schmitt (Hamburg Observatory). The workshop is organised as part of the
scope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and OPTICON-funded European Network for
the Giant Magellan Telescope) to make Scientific Organising Committee: High Time Resolution Astrophysics with
discoveries beyond our current state of Cesare Barbieri (University of Padova, the European Extremely Large Telescope
knowledge and expectations. However, Dept. of Astronomy), Giovanni Bonanno (E-ELT).
the workshop will also focus on multi- (INAF–Astronomical Observatory, Cata-
wavelength HTRA studies (radio, X-rays nia), Vik Dhillon (University of Sheffield), Details and registration information can
and gamma rays) both with present Dainis Dravins (Lund Observatory), be found at http://www.htra.ie/.
Claudia Mignone 1 The International Year of Astronomy On 9 and 10 January 2010 the Interna-
Pedro Russo 1, 2 (IYA 2009) officially closed with a cere- tional Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009)
Lars Lindberg Christensen 1 mony held at the University of Padova reached its official close with a ceremony
where Galileo Galilei taught physics. that took place in Padova, Italy, in the
A brief description of the ceremony and Aula Magna of the University of Padova,
1
ESO the contribution of ESO are presented. where Galileo Galilei taught experimen-
2
IAU tal physics and astronomy between the
end of the 16th and the beginning of the
17th century (see the image on the Astro-
nomical News section page).
In the spirit of the theme of the ceremony, struments used by astronomers have the worldwide astronomical community
bearing the ambitious title, Beyond 2009, changed and evolved ceaselessly. Look- including an impressive network for
this survey of past activities and events ing further, Roberto Gilmozzi from ESO the future with ESO education and public
was not intended as a nostalgic collec- gave an extensive overview of astronomy outreach at its focal point.
tion of memories, but instead as a solid after the IYA2009, focussing on the tele-
base for future enterprises in public out- scopes of tomorrow and particularly on
reach of astronomy and science in gen- the European Extremely Large Telescope
eral (see the logo in Figure 2). Many of the (E-ELT) which will become “the world’s
projects of IYA2009 will continue in the biggest eye on the sky”. Along with a
following years either unchanged or in a description of the main science drivers
slightly changed form; several other initia- that led to the concept of extremely large
tives significantly helped to pave the way telescopes, such as the search for Earth-
for a network of researchers and edu like exoplanets and for the first stars
cators focused on the communication of and galaxies that formed in the Universe,
astronomy, especially in developing Gilmozzi’s talk highlighted how tele-
countries where a strong astronomical scopes have grown in dimensions ever
community is not yet present. since Galileo’s time and how the E-ELT,
with its 42-metre primary mirror, would
be a natural extension of this time-hon-
ESO’s presence at the ceremony oured tradition. The revolutionary design
of this outstanding observatory and the
The International Year of Astronomy 2009 timeline of the projects were also pre-
has been a global celebration of the sented, followed by a look at the distant
four centuries of revolutionary discoveries future, and the possible projects astrono-
achieved through the use of the tele- mers are planning even beyond the ELTs.
scope. Ever since Galileo’s very first Figure 2. Beyond IYA Logo. The logo of Beyond IYA,
observations of the sky with a more pow- Although the main part of IYA2009 the signature that labels the legacy projects continu-
erful tool than the human eye, the in- is over, it leaves an important legacy for ing after 2009.
Nelson Montano, Head of the Mainte- Nelson was recognised not only in the
nance Department of the La Silla Paranal astronomical community, but also around
Observatory, died suddenly on 10 March the world in the industrial environment
2010, at the age of 42 years. field, and he participated as an invited
speaker at international industrial mainte-
Nelson joined ESO at the Paranal Observ- nance conferences.
atory in May 1999 as a mechanical engi-
neer. His warm, indefatigable character, Nelson will be remembered by his col-
as well as his well-organised personality leagues and friends at ESO not only for
helped to propel him to the position of his dedication, commitment and pro
Head of the Maintenance Department of fessionalism but also for his generous,
the La Silla Paranal Observatory in 2004. open and friendly personality that
For the first time in an astronomical was deeply appreciated by all. He will
observatory, an engineer succeeded in be dearly missed by his wife and son.
Personnel Movements
Dekker, H.; Evolution of Optical Spectrograph Kasper, M.; Amico, P.; Pompei, E.; Ageorges, N.;
A Design at ESO; 136, 13 Apai, D.; Argomedo, J.; Kornweibel, N.; Lidman,
Delmotte, N.; News from the ESO Science Archive C.; Direct Imaging of Exoplanets and Brown
Arnaboldi, M.; D’Odorico, S.; Report on the ESO Facility; 135, 49 Dwarfs with the VLT: NACO Pupil-stabilised Lyot
Workshop “Imaging at the E-ELT”; 137, 52 Delmotte, N.; News from the ESO Science Archive Coronagraphy at 4 µm; 137, 8
Facility; 137, 58 Kissler-Patig, M.; Testi, L.; Report on the ESO Work-
shop “ALMA and ELTs: A Deeper, Finer View of
B the Universe”; 136, 69
E Kissler-Patig, M.; Küpcü Yoldaş, A.; Liske, J.;
Baade, D.; Balestra, A.; Cumani, C.; Eschbaumer, S.; A Sneak Preview of the E-ELT Design Reference
Finger, G.; Geimer, C.; Mehrgan, L.; Meyer, M.; Emsellem, E.; West, M.; Leibundgut, B.; Report on Science Plan Questionnaire Results; 138, 11
Stegmeier, J.; Reyes, J.; Todorovic, M.; NGC — the 2009 ESO Fellows Symposium; 137, 56 Korhonen, H.; Hubrig, S.; Kővári, Z.; Weber, M.;
ESO’s New General Detector Controller; 136, 20 Strassmeier, K.; Hackman, T.; Wittkowski, M.;
Baade, D.; Report on the ESO Workshop “Detectors The Application of FORS1 Spectropolarimetry to
for Astronomy 2009”; 138, 31 F the Investigation of Cool Solar-like Stars; 138, 15
Baudry, A.; The ALMA Correlator: Performance and Kraus, S.; Weigelt, G.; Balega, Y.; Docobo, J.;
Science Impact in the Millimetre/Submillimetre; Fischer, R.; Walsh, J.; An Extension for ESO Head- Hofmann, K.; Preibisch, T.; Schertl, D.; Tamazian,
135, 5 quarters; 135, 2 V.; Driebe, T.; Ohnaka, K.; Petrov, R.; Schöller, M.;
Böcker, M.; Vogt, J.; Christ, O.; Müller-Leonhardt, A.; Smith, M.; Tracing the Dynamic Orbit of the
Health, Safety and Performance in High Altitude Young, Massive High-eccentricity Binary System
Observatories: A Sustainable Approach; 137, 47 G θ1 Orionis C. First results from VLTI aperture-
synthesis imaging and ESO 36-metre visual
Garcia, P.; New Infrastructures Require New Train- speckle interferometry; 136, 44
C ing: The Example of the Very Large Telescope Kurk, J.; Cimatti, A.; Daddi, E.; Mignoli, M.;
Interferometer Schools; 135, 50 Bolzonella, M.; Pozzetti, L.; Cassata, P.; Halliday,
Christensen, L. L.; ESO at the XXVIIth IAU General Gilmozzi, R.; ESO’s Telescopes, In memoriam Daniel C.; Zamorani, G.; Berta, S.; Brusa, M.; Dickinson,
Assembly; 137, 55 Enard; 136, 2 M.; Franceschini, A.; Rodighiero, G.; Rosati, P.;
Christensen, L. L.; 3D Movie Featuring ESO’s Gonté, F.; Araujo, C.; Bourtembourg, R.; Brast, R.; Renzini, A.; A VLT Large Programme to Study
Paranal Observatory; 138, 33 Derie, F.; Duhoux, P.; Dupuy, C.; Frank, C.; Kar- Galaxies at z ~ 2: GMASS — the Galaxy Mass
Christensen, L. L.; Sjöberg, B.; Janssen, E.; ESO ban, R.; Mazzoleni, R.; Noethe, L.; Sedghi, B.; Assembly Ultra-deep Spectroscopic Survey; 135,
Open House Day 2009; 138, 34 Surdej, I.; Yaitskova, N.; Luong, B.; Chueca, S.; 40
Christensen, L. L.; ESO Website is Now Available in Reyes, M.; Esposito, S.; Pinna, E.; Puglisi, A.; Kürster, M.; Zechmeister, M.; Endl, M.; Meyer, E.;
Twelve Languages; 138, 34 Pacheco, F.Q.; Dohlen, K.; Vigan, A.; On-sky Test- The UVES M Dwarf Planet Search Programme;
Christensen, L. L.; ESO Director General Visits the ing of the Active Phasing Experiment; 136, 25 136, 39
Vatican City; 138, 35
Le Bouquin, J.-B.; Millour, F.; Merand, A.; VLTI Poggianti, B.; Aragón-Salamanca, A.; Bamford, S.; van Loon, J.; You and Your Observatory — The ESO
Science Operations Team; First Images from the Barazza, F.; Best, P.; Clowe, D.; Dalcanton, J.; Users Committee; 136, 61
VLT Interferometer; 137, 25 De Lucia, G.; Desai, V.; Finn, R.; Halliday, C.; Verdes-Montenegro, L.; Report on the Workshop
Leibundgut, B.; Christensen, L. L.; Janssen, E.; ESO Jablonka, P.; Johnson, O.; Milvang-Jensen, B.; “Impact of ALMA on Spanish Extragalactic
at JENAM 2009; 136, 72 Moustakas, J.; Noll, S.; Nowak, N.; Pelló,R.; Astronomy”; 137, 50
Poirier, S.; Rudnick, G.; Saglia, R.; Sánchez- Vernet, J.; D’Odorico, S.; Christensen, L.; Dekker, H.;
Blázquez, P.; Simard, L.; Varela, J.; von der Mason, E.; Modigliani, A.; Moehler, S.; X-shooter
M Linden, A.; Whiley, I.; White, S.; Zaritsky, D.; The Starts Operation at the Paranal Observatory:
ESO Distant Cluster Sample: Galaxy Evolution A New Opportunity for Extragalactic Astronomy;
Martinez, P.; Dorrer, C.; Aller-Carpentier, E.; Kasper, and Environment out to z = 1; 136, 54 138, 4
M.; Boccaletti, A.; Dohlen, K.; Halftoning for High-
contrast Imaging: Developments for the SPHERE
and EPICS Instruments; 137, 18 R W
Mathys, G.; Leibundgut, B.; Report on the ESO
Workshop “Large Programmes”; 135, 53 Renzini, A.; Daddi, E.; Wandering in the Redshift West, M.; Rejkuba, M.; Leibundgut, B.; Emsellem, E.;
Melnick, J.; Mellier, Y.; Pasquini, L.; Leibundgut, B.; Desert; 137, 41 ESO’s Studentship Programmes: Training Tomor-
Report on the ESO Workshop on Wide-Field Richichi, A.; Barbieri, C.; Fors, O.; Mason, E.; row’s Astronomers Today; 135, 57
Spectroscopic Surveys; 136, 64 Naletto, G.; The Beauty of Speed; 135, 32 West, M.; Report on the 2009 Joint Observatories
Melo, C.; Primas, F.; Pasquini, L.; Patat, F.; Smoker, Russo, P.; Christensen, L. L.; Pierce-Price, D.; Science Retreat in Chile; 137, 57
J.; Report on the ESO Workshop “Six Years of ESO and the International Year of Astronomy
FLAMES Operations”; 135, 17 2009 Opening Ceremony; 135, 54
Mignani, R.; Neutron Star Astronomy at ESO: The Z
VLT Decade; 138, 19
Millour, F.; Chesneau, O.; Driebe, T.; Matter, A.; S Ziegler, B.; Kutdemir, E.; Da Rocha, C.; Böhm, A.;
Schmutz, W.; Lopez, B.; Petrov, R. G.; Groh, J. H.; Kapferer, W.; Kuntschner, H.; Peletier, R.; Schindler,
Bonneau, D.; Dessart, L.; Hofmann, K.-H.; Saviane, I.; Ihle, G.; Sterzik, M.; Kaufer, A.; La Silla S.; Verdugo, M.; Velocity Fields of Distant Galaxies
Weigelt, G.; Wolf-Rayet Stars at the Highest 2010+; 136, 18 with FORS2; 137, 34
Angular Resolution; 135, 26 Schindler, S.; Astronomy in Austria; 137, 2 Zoccali, M.; Hill, V.; Barbuy, B.; Lecureur, A.; Minniti,
Moorwood, A.; 30 Years of Infrared Instrumentation Schmidtobreick, L.; Mardones, P.; Castillo, R.; D.; Renzini, A.; Gonzalez, O.; Gómez, A.; Ortolani,
at ESO: Some Personal Recollections; 136, 8 ISAAC Moved to a New Home; 138, 10 S.; Chemistry of the Galactic Bulge: New Results;
Scodeggio, M.; Franzetti, P.; Garilli, B.; Le Fèvre, O.; 136, 48
Guzzo, L.; Improving the Multiplexing of VIMOS
MOS Observations for Future Spectroscopic Sur-
veys; 135, 13
Smail, I.; Walter, F.; The Less Consortium; The
LABOCA Survey of the Extended Chandra Deep
Field South (LESS); 138, 26
Smoker, J.; Haddad, N.; Iwert, O.; Deiries, S.;
Modigliani, A.; Randall, S.; D’Odorico, S.; James,
G.; Lo Curto, G.; Robert, P.; Pasquini, L.;
D owning, M.; Ledoux, C.; Martayan, C.; Dall, T.;
Vinther, J.; Melo, C.; Fox, A.; Pritchard, J.; Baade,
D.; Dekker, H.; A Tenth Birthday Present for UVES:
A CCD Upgrade of the Red Arm; 138, 8
Sulentic, J.; Marziani, P.; Stirpe, G.; Zamfir, S.;
Dultzin, D.; Calvani, M.; Repetto, P.; Zamanov, R.;
Constraining Quasar Structural Evolution with
VLT/ISAAC; 137, 30