Last evening's cloudy sunset seen from the top of Paranal

Everything, sooner or later, comes to an end. This is my last day on Paranal, and it is quite unusual. In fact, last night we started off with a very strong wind, coupled to an extreme humidity. The inversion layer was just crossing the top of Paranal, and dense clouds of vapor were passing through. All telescopes were of course closed. No way we could even thing about opening and observing. So, after watching a weird sunset, we all came down to the control room, waiting for something to happen. The temperature was rapidly dropping, it crossed zero, and eventually reached -6 C. Ice started forming on the metallic surfaces of the building on the top. After a while, we received the order from the Safety Engineer to evacuate the control room: the risk was to get ice on the road down to the base camp, and to get stuck on the top. So, although quite reluctantly, we gave up, packed our stuff and down we went, with a feeling of defiance and incompleteness.

Dead astronomers at the UT2-Kueyen Console.

Observing in this season, when the nights are still long, can be quite tiring. It is not just to stay up all night long; it is the psychological stress coming from the awareness that one is operating one of the most sophisticated and expensive ground-based astronomical facilities of the world. Every single minute of telescope time is valuable, no time losses can be afforded. And the thing is under your responsibility. At the end of the night it always takes me at least one hour to relax, before I can finally get asleep. For this reason, after a week, one starts looking forward to the end of the shift. Nevertheless, similarly to what happens to people under detention (as they tell me), at some point you start loving your torturer, so that in the end you even regret having to leave… Or, at least, this is what happens to me. It is maybe also the atmosphere that builds up after many nights shared with your colleagues, the relationships that strengthen  with time, maybe because of isolation… A bit of all of this. So that, on the last day, one is just a bit sad. But we all know that this will be gone, once sitting in the airport of Antofagasta, in front of a cold La Serena Libre

There is one last thing I wish to mention here. Last night, when we had to come down, we all had dinner together, and the atmosphere was quite cheerful. Jokes about science, astronomers, our purpose in life… But before going to sleep, I felt like something was still missing. Although the wind was blowing strong and cold, I pulled out my binocular and went out into the desert, just in front of the residencia. Damn cold, but beautiful. Like diving into the Milky Way. Do you remember that feeling of loneliness I had the other day when I strode down to desert valley? Well, now it was amplified a thousand times, and accompanied with fear. It is not completely clear why, though. In the past I had always felt at home in front of the night sky. But now it seemed to me like an abyss, I and felt like being suspended over the edge, on the verge of falling, hopelessly, into nothing. Maybe it was just the cold. I could not feel my fingers anymore, frozen on the icy metal of the Zeiss binocular… Again, entering the tropical-like atmosphere of the garden brought me back to this planet.

Tonight I fly to Santiago, and tomorrow back to Europe. It is going to be a long way home…

Good bye, Paranal.

This is now the 8th night of this run at the Very Large Telescope. I have been observing at Kueyen, the second 8.2m unit telescope (UT2 for friends). At the moment it is equipped with three spectrographs, UVES, FLAMES, and X-Shooter. All nights where good, very stable and quiet. But tonight the wind is blowing strong, from the north. So strong that we had to close down after some hours of operations. The unit telescopes are huge, 400 tons,  earthquake-proof metallic structures, but still you can move them with a finger. They hold a secondary mirror which is about 1.2m in diameter (which is larger than many professional telescopes around the world…). And this is supported by a complex piece of work, which is capable of tip-tilting the mirror, in order to compensate for several effects. Including the vibrations induced by the wind, which is always present here. However, enough is enough. Tonight’s wind is too much, and it could endanger the sophisticated mechanics that make the thing working so nicely under normal conditions. Wind gusts exceed in fact 85 km/h, and the steel structure of the control room, where I am sitting, shakes from time to time (!). Looking at the trend displayed on monitors of Paranal’s ambient server,  it does not look like it is going to get better any time soon. So, I thought I could blog a bit.

While I guess it is clear to everybody why this place is extraordinary during the night (by the way, yesterday evening we received the visit of the Chilean Ambassador of Thailand), it is maybe less evident why this is a fascinating place in daytime too. In fact, it does not happen very often (at least not to Europeans) to be in the middle of a desert, at more than 2000 m above sea level, far from any civilized place. And still be alive. This is probably why, a couple of days ago, after having some breakfast (at 3 pm…), I decided to go for a walk into the desert, in the direction of the coast. From the top of Paranal I had seen two whitish spots, some km from the residencia. They always attracted my curiosity, and this was the time to see what they actually were. So, I set out heading west. After descending a steep hill, I had to cross a shallow slope populated by big stones. Big a with smooth and polished surfaces, suggesting an extremely long exposure to wind and sand. Just beautiful, natural sculptures. I can’t help myself thinking that my father would love to try them… On my way I collect a few samples; a friend of mine has asked me to bring a few for her collection.

After a while I loose sight of the white spots, and I entere an area full of small stones. My steps lift small clouds of dust, which are immediately blown away by the wind, omnipresent in this place. I keep walking at a good pace, but the distances do not seem to get smaller. It must be the effect of the extreme air transparency, which makes things appear much closer than they are. At least to the eyes of somebody used to look at the landscape through moisture and haze, as is the case in continental Europe. The sun shines fiercely on the dry plain, while I keep striding along a straight line. From time to time I see my final destination emerging from behind the irregularities of the soil. The landscape is stunning. If it were not for this metallic blue sky, I’d say I was on the moon (well, maybe one would need to add a few craters here and there). My mouth starts to be dry, and I feel the heat on my face. Jee, I thought it was shorter…

As I walk I try to imagine how it would be like camping for a night in the middle of this plain. The black vault of the sky pierced by the Milky Way stars, the wind, the desert… it must be fantastic. But tonight I can’t I have to be back around 6pm, for a quick dinner. Then it will be time to leave the base camp for the top. Another night is awaiting…

After about 50 minutes I get to the place. It is not as white as I had imagined. I had thought it was some kind of salt, the residual of evaporation of rare rain. But no, it is a very fine mud. And it does not even taste like salt; it actually does not have any taste at all (erm, yes, I have tried it…). I lay down on a stone and I watch the sky for  while. I know where the residencia is, but it is too far and I cannot make its shape. I start to be carried away… I really feel alone, and I perceive my fragility more than ever, enhanced by the consciousness of where I am. Fortunately the domes of the VLT, high up, give me a reference, a link to reality (!). From here, those telescopes are the only sign I still am on an inhabited planet. If it were not for those manufacts (and what manufacts!), I could easily be on some solitary moon of an unlikely planetary system… I am not sure whether I should laugh or worry about this… Anyway, it is time to get back. And I have now to proceed uphill. Slowly, as I make progress through the colored stones of the plain, I start regaining the link to Earth. And I rejoice at the thought of the reassuring atmosphere I will breath in the residencia. I indeed had not imagined I would feel so deeply alone in the desert… “Cm’on, you speak like you had been alone on a forty days journey across the Arabic desert!” - I can hear my brother’s voice teasing me… Yes, I would probably have the same reaction to somebody telling me this story.

But as I enter the garden of the residencia, I can’t help myself feeling back home. More than ten years ago, when I was here in Chile as a post-doc, I met an Italian man, who owned a small mining plant in Atacama. “The desert is a philosophy” - he told me once. I remember I had not fully appreciated the meaning of that statement. Maybe now I’ve got a glimpse of what he actually meant.

The wind still blows strong and the telescopes keep being closed. There are four hours before the morning twilight. There is still hope to open again…

I am now sitting in the control room of the Very Large Telescope. The night is quiet. The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is currently in use, and our unit telescope (UT2, Kueyen, the Moon) is busy. This gives me some time to write a few lines. The site is wonderful, as usual. Soon I am going to take my small Zeiss binocular up to the telescopes platform, and have a look to the Milky Way. Always astonishing.

Daniel Funeriu.

While recalling what happened during the past weeks, something I had almost forgotten resurfaced. In fact, before leaving for holidays, I had a close encounter with a very interesting person. This is Daniel Funeriu, Minister of Education, Research and Innovation of Rumenia. Don’t ask me how (coincidences in life might be sometimes very intriguing), but at some point I found myself talking to the Minister in my dining room, in Garching.

I was immediately impressed by his personality, his enthusiasm, and his will of really change things. Fighting old farts and established trade unions seems to be his purpose in life. If you have a chance, have a look at his imposing CV, at the positions he has occupied, and the research he has done. And have a look at his age too… Among other things he was also member of the European Parliament.

What really impressed me was the fact that he is a politician, but he has kept is pristine scientist attitude, which is immediately perceived when he talks to you, in the most natural way you could imagine. At some point he asked me about my research activity.

“Astonomy?” - he said, half joking. “There are two disciplines I never considered: astronomy and quantum physics. There is nothing you can change there… you cannot put your hands on what you work on…“. Truly enough… the excruciating torture of astronomers (I am not sure about quantum physicists, though).

Ok, I’ll now go up to the platform, watching the stars. Just to renew the ancient link we have with them. My thoughts go to the 33 Chilean miners, buried more than 700m below the ground, only about 300 km south of Paranal. There is great hope, and being here one really feels a whole nation supporting them and their families.

Mmm, after a veeeery loooong trip, I’m back to Chile. I am now in Santiago, but tomorrow I will fly up to Antofagasta, and then up to Paranal. Looking at my blog I have just noticed the last 3 posts are gone. I was reporting on the Paris conference on exploding stars. Too bad. In the next days (or better said nights) I will blog about the observations I will be doing at Kueyen, using X-Shooter, Flames and UVES.

I left Europe yesterday. I was actually in Northern Italy, on vacation. I had to leave the warm sun on the Adriatic Sea. My kids and my wife are still enjoying it… Here in STGO it is rainy and cold. But tomorrow the scene is going to change radically. I’ll tell you about it in the next days.

Columbus Lighthouse, Santo Domingo - Dominican Republic

Light pollution is a serious issue, and it does not affect only astronomers. If you wish to get a nice introduction on the subject, visit the wikipedia page; it contains lots of useful links and references to literature and web sites.

Usually, the two words “light pollution” bring to your mind images of densely populated areas, full of commercial, public and private outdoors lighting. In many cases just throwing light into the skies, either because of bad lamp design or (even worse) on purpose. This is the case for the building portrayed in the picture here to the left. This photonic phallic symbol (I do not know what other name one may use), is the essence of energy wasting. Besides being totally useless, it shows a blatant contempt of nature and its rights. Let alone the complete lack of respect for the taxpayer. You can get more details on this monster at this link. Of course the world is full of such things, so that we are sending upwards a huge amount of useless light, whose only purpose might be to facilitate the landing of alien star-ships. You can see a nice collection of very bad lighting examples (collected in Italy) at the web site of Cielo Buio, the Italian dark sky association.

As an optical astronomer I am particularly sensitive to this problem, and in the last years I have started taking some public action. You might remember my participation to the conference of the International Commission on Illumination in Vienna. If you are interested in a professional astronomer’s point of view,  you can find my paper here. One of the very basic recommendations to mitigate the problem of light pollution (and to save energy and reduce CO2 emission) is to use artificial outdoors lighting only when strictly necessary (both in space and time), and to avoid any emission above horizontal (lamps should have the so-called Upward Light Output Ratio equal to 0%). Because of the financial recession, dark sky activists had some successes in the last years, because the argument of energy saving was (and still is) a good one to convince politicians and tax payers that good money could be saved just, well…, switching off useless lights. A real example? In my village, north-east of Italy, since a couple of years every second street lamp is switched off after midnight (with some exception at crossroads). The results? A significant energy saving, with no additional expenses and no complaints from the citizens. Easy, uh? Admittedly, I have been lobbing a bit to obtain that

The 32m parabola of the Medicina radio-telescope.

Truly enough, professional astronomers should all be very sensitive to this problem. And the fact that they work in the mid-IR or in radio, should be no excuse.

Well, this is absolutely not the case. I will show here just an example, to make things clear. A colleague of mine, working in Italy and very active in the field of light pollution, has brought to my attention the fact that the largest Italian radio-telescope, located in Medicina (Bologna), is illuminated during the night. The purpose of this is mysterious. Radio-astronomers are well aware of the problem of electromagnetic interferences, which pose a serious treat to their observations. Nevertheless, they illuminate their own scientific equipment just for the fun of it (I do not see any other reason). Obviously the electromagnetic radiation emitted by those bright lamps is armless for their science. And so, who cares? It is also obvious that switching off those lights would not solve the problem of light pollution in the Italian peninsula (and believe me, it is a bright place!). But it would at least give a clear example and show coherence.

How can we address administrators and politicians, tell them that they should replace their fixtures, use less light, deploy time controls, switch off lamps in empty parking lots, reduce the emissions above horizontal and so on when some of our main scientific facilities constitute a clear violation of all those requirements? Indeed, it is a paradoxical situation. Immediately after I was made aware of this, I wrote a letter to the director of the radio-telescope, and the director of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. That was more than two weeks ago. Guess what? No answer… I thought I had at least shared my disappointment with you

We are now going one step further, asking the International Astronomical Union to take the appropriate actions. Let’s see what comes out of it.

I close this somewhat sad post with a sequence of images I have been downloading from the web site of the radio-observatory since a few hours. They have been taken by a webcam which is continuously watching the parabola. As you will see, the lights have been turned on around 20:50 CET. It is now 00:35 CET and lights are still on.

I would be curious to see when the lights are switched off. I guess at sunrise, but I am not sure I am willing to check this tonight But if you happen to be somewhere around the world in a favorable timezone, just take a look, download the image and send it to me. I’ll add it to the sequence.

Jayant Narlikar talking about microbial life in the stratosphere.

Prof. Jayant Narlikar is visiting the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching this week. Today he gave a very interesting seminar on a project he led, for the search of micro-organisms in the stratosphere. You may remember that Jayant Narlikar was a student of Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the most productive and imaginative scientists of last century. Hoyle has done lots of things, and among these is the revival of the panspermia hypothesis, which he put forward together with Chandra Wickramasinghe. In a nutshell, they proposed that microbial life, which they argued is spread all over the places in interstellar space, can ride comets, and therefore life on Earth might have been seeded from space. This of course does not solve the problem of how life started, but it certainly moves the focus away from our good old Earth (and, let me add, gives one final kick to geocentrism). Ideally, in order to test this hypothesis, one would need to take samples of cometary tails and see whether they host microbial life forms (see for instance this paper by Wickramasinghe, Hoyle and Narlikar). Although in the future this might be indeed possible (see for instance the Rosetta mission in route to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko), we are so far bounded to much closer distances.

A first step in this enterprise is the attempt of detecting life forms high up in Earth’s atmosphere. For this purpose, a group of researchers led by prof. Narlikar, has done two experiments. Very briefly, they have launched two balloons carrying a payload including a series of sterilized and evacuated tubes. Each of them is equipped with a valve that can be opened via a remote control. As far as the height is concerned, one does not want to stay too close to the ground (say the first 25 km or so, which one could say are probably contaminated by microbial forms certainly coming from Earth), neither go too high (above 90 km), because first of all it gets very expensive and then because the air density up there is so low that one would have very little chances to collect any measurable sample. In the end, the combination of these facts led Jayant and collaborators to reach an height of 41 km. I will not go into the details in this post. If you are interested you can find a report on the first mission here. The bottom line is that microbial life forms were indeed brought back by the returning payload (which was of course attached to a parachute). Some of them were found to share only about 24% of the properties of known bacteria (one of them was named as Janibacter Hoylei, in the honor of Fred Hoyle). These bacteria were also found to be much more resistant to UV radiation than any known microbial life form, and this was interpreted as a proof that they had spent enough time in a UV rich environment.

If these bacteria come from the ground, it is not clear how they got so high in the first place. There is no obvious mechanism that would do. On the other hand, if these bacteria come from, say, meteorites, then their presence up there is natural. Jayant mentioned that in the biological community such a possibility is considered with extreme skepticism, because we are used to think that life on Earth started, well… on Earth. To use Jayant’s words: “life coming from the outside would transform a closed system into an open one“. Biologists seem to have hard times in swallowing this. Of course, finding microbial life at 41 km is one thing, proving this comes from outer space is a completely different issue. Let alone the [yet unknown] mechanism that would lift up those life forms, but after all they might just be another form of extremophiles. As you may know, in the ‘80 and ‘90 several microbial life forms have been discovered in hydrothermal vents and in very deep pits (km under Earth’s surface), living in absence of light, under obstile temperature, pressure, and chemical conditions. This has opened a new chapter in astrobiology, since it has clearly shown that life can take place in conditions which are rather deviant from the ones we used to consider as crucial for life.

Halton Arp (left) and Jayant Narlikar (right) at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (photo by the author).

The final word on the origin of these stratospheric life forms will have to await for an isotopic analysis (similar to the one done for meteorites). If those things are extra-terrestrial, then their isotopic ratios must be different from those we measure for certified terrestrial life forms. The analysis is all but simple… But I am sure it will be attempted in future missions.

I was sitting in the first row of the MPA Seminar Room. To my right I had nobody less than Halton (Chip) Arp. One of the most enthusiastic astronomers I have ever met. And also one of the most unhorthodox ones, for that matter. You know, is one of those astronomers you have read in the text books, and talking to him brings back memories of people like Allan Sandage and Geoffrey Burbidge. Halton has done many things. The atlas of peculiar galaxies just to name one; the sky is full of galaxies that bring his name. Arp 244, Arp 87… he has received many honors and prizes. And he is very famous because of his strong opposition to the Big Bang model. Along this line, he has done quite some work together with Jayant. Actually, just before I took the picture you can see here, he joked  saying that he could do some of the things he did just because he “was sitting on Jayant’s shoulders” (nicely paraphrasing the famous sentence by Newton).

Talking about non-horthodox things. Incidentally, we just got the referee report for our paper on the very old stars, those which would be older than the universe  (see this old post of mine). Guess what? It was brutally rejected by Astronomy & Astrophysics. Admittedly there are some weaknesses, and we will be working on them. No matter what happens to that paper, though, it was worth the attempt.

ESO’s Director General has just announced that the 42m E-ELT will be built on Cerro Armazones, Chile. For more details see the ESO press release.  This is some 30km away from Cerro Paranal. So, South America will host the largest optical/near-IR telescope on Earth. Great news!!!

You might remember last summer I had installed a stone sundial. Well, during the Easter vacations I finally found the time to complete it.

After we had put it in place on the southerly wall of my friend’s house, I have asked my friend and ingenieur Armando to manufacture the gnomon. After a few weeks I gave him all the dimension and relevant specifications, he came back to me with a very nice piece of work. He had used stainless steel, and reproduced the sun at the end of the style with a laser cutting machine. The look of the piece is very high-tech, making a very nice contrast with the natural appearance of the stone and the ancient tradition of sun-dialing.

The laser-cut sun has a small hole in the center, so that rather than by a pure shadow cast on the sundial tracks, the time is marked by a little bright spot, mimicking the sun.

After many months of silence, the stone sundial is now doing its job, discretely and without any need for maintenance.

Mane diu.

During the Easter vacations that was not the only astronomically oriented activity. In fact I have given two lectures to high school students. The first one was during their general assembly, when they use to invite an expert in a field of their choice. And this time it was the turn of astronomy. The auditorium was almost full, with about 450 people attending. A nice experience, indeed. The other seminar was much more specialistic and meant for the students of the last year. While in the general assembly I had presented the life of an astronomer (and more in general of a scientist), in this lecture I focused on the life in the universe, with special attention to ground based projects, like to ones carried out at ESO.

Sometimes one fears it is impossible to surprise and bring enthusiasm to the young generation, since they have already seen everything. But this is actually not true. Maybe it is particularly easy with astronomy, I do not know, but they are very responsive and sensible to intellectual stimulation. Again, a nice experience.

Then, finally, I spent several hours during a nice spring night measuring the altitude of a number of bright stars with my good old Zeiss theodolite. You might wonder why. Well, the reason is two-fold. The first is a scientific one. I needed to test the accuracy I could achieve on the altitude measurements with that instrumental setup (it turns out to be of the order of 1 minute of arc) for my archaeoastronomical work. The second is more “educational”. I have always been told about atmospheric refraction and I wished to measure it directly, simply comparing the altitudes I got from my theodolite readings of objects at different zenith distances. As you might imagine, indeed, the atmospheric refraction is there and it clearly grows as one goes down to the horizon.

In all modern telescopes the refraction is taken into account automatically when you point. Even as a professional you do not even need to know it exists (as many other things, for that matter). However, from time to time I like to refresh my mind with this kind of experiments, which bring me back to the basic notions of classical astronomy (and make me feel a bit like Tycho ).

Yesterday night I went to the cinema (yes, Lowell, in the end I made it…) and saw Agora, the last movie by Alejandro Amenabar (premiered in Germany on March 13). What does this have to do with astronomy? Well, as you may know, it tells the story of Hypatia, a scholar in the ancient Alexandria, who has worked in mathematics and astronomy. It was the last show of the day and I was alone in the room, which made the whole thing quite different from the usual visit to a cinema. In the adjacent room they were giving Shutter Island, attended by a lot many more people

If you watch the movie as such, then you come out saying it is beautiful. Especially if you are an astronomer. The mixture between the dark night sky and the outstanding reconstruction of the ancient Alexandria is stunning. Also, Hypatia incarnates the figure of the pure scientists, who sticks to her principles and ideas, at the price of her own life. All the more because Hypatia was a woman (beautifully plaid by a splendid Rachel Weisz).

The price one has to pay for making the story attractive (and appealing to to great public), is that lots of dramatic license has to be used. One for all. Hypatia is known to have worked on the conical sections, that is a fact. But at the end of the movie we are explicitly told that she arrived at the conclusion that the planets had to move on elliptical orbits, with the sun on what we would now call one of the two foci. This is clearly the first law of Kepler, anticipated by some 12 centuries and derived by pure deduction. Besides lacking any historical proof, this is simply too hard to swallow. All planets have has a matter of fact very small eccentricities (Mercury is the only exception), making their orbits very close to a circle. It is only when it comes to precise measurements that one sees their effect (Kepler had the Tycho’s data to derive his laws). In fact, I completely failed to follow the line of thought Hypatia uses to derive Kepler’s first law.

But this is not the only problem with the movie. There are several historical “licenses” or even mistakes. You can find a critical review here, which I found very interesting and stimulating. For the goofs have a look here.

However, the movie is certainly inspirational and worth watching. Just be aware that many of the things you are presented with are interpretations, dramatic licenses and, in some cases, even inventions.

Light Pollution on the cover of Physics Today

A short one related to my previous post. A paper on light pollution appeared on Physics Today is now publicly available. If you are interested, you can read it here.