I am sick, at home. Stomach not working as originally designed. Therefore I find some time to blog. These last days have been very busy with the organization of the ESO Observing Programmes Committee, the board that selects the scientific projects that make to the ESO telescopes, including the VLT. I’ll tell you more about that; for the time being it suffices to say that we have received 969 valid proposals for the next semester, with all what this entails…

Today I finished the review of a PhD Thesis from the Australian National University. A very good one, a pleasure to read. It is nice to see these young researchers, emerging from the masses, with brilliant ideas. They are still naive enough (in the most positive sense) to tell us old farts that there is a lot more to learn. Amazing… at the end I was full of enthusiasm, ready to go back to my projects, which only yesterday seemed the most boring and inconclusive ones…

Paul Young and myself at ESO (photo by Simon Lowery).

Last week I met the rock star Paul Young. Do not ask me how and why. It just happened. Well, a friend of Paul is actually working at ESO, and is name is Simon. So, for a number of coincidences, I was asked to give Paul Young an introduction to ESO, showing him a bit around, and explaining what we do here. He listened very carefully to what I said, and he asked lots of questions.  Certainly an interesting person, let aside him being a rock/soul star.

I still can’t believe this. It was many years ago that I was listening to “Come back and stay“, “Love of the common people“, “Wherever I lay my hat“, “Senza una donna/Without a woman” (with Zucchero “Sugar” Fornaciari). You know, one of those things that you would never expect to happen. All the more if you are an astronomer… But Simon has more aces in his sleeve. So, you can expect some more surprises in the future.

By the way, you remember that some time ago, with Jayant Narlikar, Ken Freeman and Vijay Mohan we tried to find traces of stars older than the universe.  Well, the saga is now over, and the Big Bang model is still safe. I’ll blog a bit more on that.

Now let me get back to “Next”, a nice movie with Nicolas Cage. Then, good night.

Great news! The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess,“for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae”. This was somehow in the air since 2007, when they were assigned the Gruber Cosmology Prize. But now is real. No matter what the physical explanation for the observed effect is, the finding is striking, and probably constitutes one of the most important scientific results of the past century. Truly enough there is probably another branch of astrophysics that has achieved great results in the last 20 years, and that is the one of extra-solar planets, led by the Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor. However, although it had a great impact on the public (and understandably so), its importance is somehow more philosophical than physical. On the contrary, the study of distant Supernovae and their deviating behavior have triggered a great discussion, and its implications may be very profound.

But it is no much about the discovery in itself that I like to blog about. You can find a lot on the web about this. No, I’d like to write a bit about the personal/human aspect of this.

Photo by Nick Suntzeff (C).

I met Saul, Adam and Brian in 1995, at Aiguablava, near Barcelona, at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on thermonuclear explosions. At that time I was a PhD student, and that was my first international conference on Supernovae. I remember that Adam was a young student of Robert Kirshner, while Brian was just out of his PhD, which he also did under the supervision of Bob. Saul was a bit more senior;  I remember I had one nice dinner with him. At that time their projects were just starting. As you may remember, they followed two different paths. The two competing teams (the high-z SN Search and the Supernova Cosmology Project) were led by Saul and Brian. There is a nice picture (taken by Nick Suntzeff) that portraits Brian and Saul while they are boxing. It effectively renders the friendly competition between the two teams. They found similar results, and they both could not believe in what they had found. For some time they were convinced something was wrong with their data. I was not involved in either of the projects. However, when I was working in the team of the 3.6m in La Silla (Chile), I assisted to a couple of observing sessions. That was quite a challenge. They were visionary, in the sense that they were indeed seeing things beyond the horizon of what was, at that time, barely technically feasible. And their stubbornness is today rightly awarded a Nobel prize.

Brian Schmidt in S. Barbara - CA (2009).

Among the three of them, Brian is the one I know best. Last week he was in my office here in Garching, together with his former PhD student Wolfgang Kerzendorf, to discuss the details of a future project. I still can’t believe that. Gee, I should have taken a photo… You know, when I was young, a Nobel prize meant to me some old researcher. Yes, somebody like Einstein, Bohr, and the like. But the man is one year younger than me, and I sat many times in conferences chatting with him. I am not sure what of him I admire more: his scientific skills or his personality. One of those amazing guys that make you feel comfortable, although he is several steps above you… Every time I think about him I cannot help myself comparing with some senior (especially Italian) professors, who treat you with a superiority that has no counterpart in their scientific thickness…

The more I think about it and the more astounding I find the whole thing. Sure, I had met in person another Nobel Prize, Riccardo Giacconi, when he was the director of ESO. But he incarnated more the ideal of a Nobel Prize winner, at least in my imagination, especially because he belongs to another generation. But Brian, Adam are *my* generation. And soon they will be stepping on the stage where Einstein, and other great personalities have walked. And they will go down to history. On the other hand, this also reminds me that this happens only to a few scientists. All the others will be soon forgotten.  All their struggles, and obsessions to add some word to the pages of the great book of science will vanish. A sad thought, you may think. Indeed…

Adam Riess in S.Barbara - CA (2009).

To regain some spirit, I’ll now close posting two photos of Adam I took in S. Barbara. On the left you see him with a bottle of wine, called “Lambda”. On the right, I had replaced Lambda with “w” (which Adam prefers). The difference is subtle, but the physics behind that are different.

Yesterday, while digging into more than 800 emails (already excluding spam) received during my summer vacation, I realized I have lost one of THE chances of my life. Scrolling down the list, searching for the most urgent things, I stumbled upon a message with a strange subject:

From the Dark Side of the Moon to Paranal

The sender is my colleague astronomer and good, old friend  Martino Romaniello, who is well aware of some of my passions. I open the message. It starts with

!!!!

followed by a web link. I click on it and I see the picture you can also see here:

That is a blow. You might not recognize him, but I immediately did. It is nobody less than Alan Parsons, audio engineer, musician and producer, sitting in the control room of the VLT. There were times in my life when I only listened to J.S. Bach, Franco Battiato and Alan Parsons. His music is full of references to astronomy, and it is certainly not a coincidence that he visited the largest astronomical observatory in the world after his concert in Santiago, last May. You can see more of this and his new group, the SubClones, here.

I had dreamed so many times to meet him. And I lost what probably was my only opportunity. I just missed the event…

All what I could do, when I got back home very late yesterday, was to play an old Alan Parsons’ Project album (The turn of a friendly card) and celebrate with a cold beer the missed opportunity, in the deepest despair.

days are numbers, watch the stars/ we can only see so far

Margherita Hack

Just back from holidays. Many things happened, and maybe I’ll find the time to report about a few of them. But the funniest, and at the same time the most frustrating one was a public talk I gave together with Margherita Hack. She is the most famous Italian popularizer of astronomy, and she appears quite often on national TV channels, newspapers and magazines.

The day after I wrote a short novel about this evening. As I really needed to use many words, and my English is not good enough for that, I had to write it in Italian, my mother tongue. If you happen to understand it, here you go.

Sono appena tornato dalle vacanze. Sono successe molte cose, e forse trovero’ il tempo per parlarne, almeno di alcune. Ma la piu’ divertente, ed allo stesso tempo la piu’ frustrante, e’ stata una conferenza pubblica che ho tenuto assieme a Margherita Hack. E’ la piu’ famosa divulgatrice italiana di astronomia, e appare spesso in TV, sui giornali e sulle riviste.

Il giorno dopo ho scritto un breve racconto. Siccome mi servivano un sacco di parole, ed il mio inglese non e’ sufficientemente buono, l’ho scritto in italiano. Se ti interessa, lo puoi leggere qui.

Many things happened since my last post here. One of them is that I got a new job. Well, yes, I’m still an astronomer, but after ten years of work as support astronomer in the Users Support Dept., I now moved to the Observing Programmes Office of ESO, which I am now leading.

What? Those of you who know me might indeed wonder how this can possibly be. Well, not sure… As a consequence, I changed office, building, collaborators and so on. But I’m still at the European Southern Observatory, my alma mater.

The Panel Scientific Assistants (a.k.a. secretaries) relaxing after the Panel sessions.

In these days, with my Department, I am going through a very interesting exercise. Twice a year, ESO summons some 80 astronomers from all over the world to judge the about 1000 proposals we receive for observing at the Very Large Telescope and the other ESO facilities. Though job, but very exciting, both from a scientific and a social point of view.

The team working with me is wonderful, very dedicated and very funny too. All the fears I had are fading away by the day. Sure enough, as somebody made me notice, there is still room for failure

The meeting lasts one week, during which the referees keep discussing the proposals and ranking them. In the end, they will deliver to us a final ranked list, which we will use to finally schedule the telescope. That’s my next task. This will start already on Saturday morning, I fear. My next concern is telling that to my wife

More on the next days.

Music has always been a relevant ingredient in my intellectual life. If I had to summarize it in a few words, I’d say I am not sure what I really am: a failed musician or a failed scientist

The WDR orchestra at Glauco's concert (photo by the author).

As you may remember, I have a very good and old friend, Glauco Venier.  He is a jazz piano player and composer, specialized in contaminating jazz with traditional music from Friuli, the region of N-E Italy from which we both come. His music has played quite some role in my activities, and some years ago, together with the Italian actor (and friend) Massimo Somaglino we have put together L’Ombra della Terra (the shadow of the Earth). You’ll find a post on this here. His fame has been growing quite a lot in the last years, with some very successful productions in collaboration with the British singer Norma Winstone and the German saxophonist Klaus Gesing. Since then he is continuously in tour around the world. This notwithstanding, he has remained a very friendly and open person, deeply rooted into his homeland and its traditions. These are a very fertile source of inspiration for his compositions. At some point, his music reached the ears of nobody less than Manfred Eicher, famous founder and producer of the notorious ECM Records. This has so far turned into two beautiful CDs, “Distances” and “Stories yet to tell“.

Glauco Venier in Cologne, playing with the WDR Orchestra and Big Band (photo by the author).

I remember that more or less one year ago, during one of our friendly meetings, Glauco has shown me a letter from the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, where a very interesting project was described. A concert in Cologne, in which Glauco’s music, arranged by Michael Abene, would be played by the WDR Symphony Orchestra and the WDR Big Band. You know, one of those “wow” things that make you breathless. I promised him that I and a group of old friends, all from Friuli, would join him there, no matter what. And so was it.

Last Wednesday, Adele and I left Munich airport to Cologne, where we joined a group of good old friends, arriving from Friuli. Meeting people that you have known since your childhood in a foreign country is always very special, and this time was no exception. We had great time, touring around Cologne, visiting the imposing cathedral, a few museums, and a number of Knaiben, where we tasted many times the local Koelsch bier. But all the expectation was building around the concert at the WDR auditorium, right in the center of Cologne. Having a friend playing there, with one of the most renown orchestras and big bands of all Germany is an event that does not happen so frequently.

Michael Abene, the WDR orchestra and Big Band, and Glauco Venier (photo by the author).

On top of that, from Glauco we had some anticipation about the program, which would include traditional songs from the Friulian area, sang in our native language by the Italian singer Diana Torto. I had the chance to listen to her beautiful voice last summer. A great singer, no doubt, featuring an extreme control of her voice, mixed to a warm Italian style.The WDR Orchestra and the Big Band (for a total of more than sixty players on the stage) were going to be directed by the American composer and arranger Michael Abene, and by the young, promising British director and composer Jules Buckley. In the sight of all these facts, we dressed up and showed up at the concert hall well in advance, to find a place in the front rows. You can only imagine the emotion. The auditorium was packed with people. Following the most pure German style, the concert started at eight o’clock, and was broadcast live through the WDR-3 channel. I hope a CD is going to come out of this, because there is no way I can describe it. Fantastic is probably the word. But it was much more than that. Already from the very incipit, which was a monodic theme from the ancient tradition of Aquileia singed solo by Diana Torto, the concert was a sequence of deep emotions. My friends and I were moved, several times…

At the end of the concert, during a never ending series of applause, we pulled out the old flag of Friuli, dating back to the times when this small region was a patriarchal state. I guess that was something unheard off in the WDR concert hall, and it certainly created some curiosity, especially when Glauco, from the stage, finally noticed it. He pulled out a small, identical flag, he had kept on the Grand Steinway & Sons for all the concert.

Great concert, great music, great emotions.

At the Lighting Design Conference in Drammen - Norway

Busy days… things have [somewhat unexpectedly] changed in my professional life (I’ll blog about this when I’m settled. I just anticipate I’m still an astronomer ;-)), and this comes at a time where many other things are happening.

Our paper on the very old stars was re-submitted after the first pass of the second referee. Now there is one serious point that needs to be addressed, which is the possibility that those stars are actually pre-Main-Sequence stars. I’ll write more in a future post.

Another article on the connection between recurrent novae and Type Ia Supernovae has just been accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics. This is currently my main field of research, and the work gave me quite some satisfaction. More on this will come if the paper submitted by my colleague Assaf Sternberg will be finally accepted by the prestigious journal Science. But I will get back on this with more details.

Last week, I was in Drammen (Norway), giving the opening speech at the Lighting Design Conference. Here the audience was very much receptive of the issues related to light pollution, and the attitude was very much collaborative. Lots of students were attending, and when I finished the talk there were demonstrations of approval which resembled more those of a pop concert than those typical of an academical environment.

My talk was followed by many very interesting and inspiring presentations. Because the conference was focusing on the Nordic environment, many of the presentations had very nice pictures of the Scandinavian landscape. Very fascinating. There are many things that we, well tempered, intermediate-latitude people tend to ignore about the peculiarities of the Nordic countries. Places where sun and light assume a different meaning.

The Place in Elsinore - light design by Kai Piippo (courtesy of K. Piippo).

I also had the honor and the pleasure to meet a famous Scandinavian light designer, Kai Piippo. He gave a intriguing presentation. Two things impressed me more: a) Kai presented the lighting of the Place of Elsinore (yes, that famous Elsinore of Hamlet), where he used a very small amount of light, and yet achieved a wonderful result, and b) he said to me that “the light designer is your best friend“. The statement is less paradoxical than it may seem. He thinks that professional light designers have lots in common with us [astronomers], and we should be talking more than we actually do. I certainly will…

Another nice surprise was meeting again Nevena Kovacevic, a young light designer I met in Stockholm last year. And more of a surprise was learning that, inspired by my presentation in Stockholm, she has been working at a project that included the Milky Way. I can’t say more here, because she is running for some prize and the thing needs to be kept confidential. Here I can only anticipate that she had a brilliant idea, which is using existing street lighting to show stars in the middle of a town. Once the project is finished, I will certainly blog about it. Thanks, Nevena!

The day after coming back from Drammen I left to Goettingen for a week-end with my family. Very nice university town, where very remarkable people lived and taught (Gauss, Born, Hilbert, Minkowski, Planck, Klein, Hahn, …). And, coming back to Munich, driving across a very nice landscape, we passed towns like Halle, Mulhausen, and others. Places where J.S. Bach had spent some time… All in all, an overwhelming week-end.

Every year here in Garching there is a workshop organized by the International Max Planck Research School for Astrophysics (IMPRS for short). The purpose is to give the chance to brilliant undergraduate students to participate to the IMPRS programme and get a PhD in Astrophysics in one of the most active campuses in Europe and in the world. This year the IMPRS received almost 140 applications, out of which about 50 candidates were invited to a 3-day workshop, where they could give a presentation on their scientific interests, meet other students and potential supervisors for their PhD Thesis.

As I am member of the selection committee for the European Southern Observatory, which is a partner of the IMPRS, I had the privilege to participate to the workshop, and to meet lots of young, brilliant people. I must say a great experience. I would have loved to have something similar proposed to me when I was at that stage in my career.

But then come some considerations. If I look at the quality of these young researchers, I cannot help myself feeling overwhelmed. In my times I could have never matched their level, their already professional way of presenting themselves, their ability of establishing links with senior researchers, their open-mindedness. And, of course, their enthusiasm. It is just astonishing.

It is maybe because I am starting to loose the freshness of the youth, the genuine desire to get into real science, to do it “hands on”. All sad thoughts.

But there is an episode I wish to mention here. During these last days I had the chance to chat with a number of students, coming from all over the world. And there is one who impressed me particularly. He got fascinated by the personality of Jayant Narlikar (whom I had already the chance to talk about in this blog), and since then he has always been dreaming about becoming a professional astronomer. This wish became more and more serious, and with big sacrifices, he finally managed to start a career in astrophysics. I could see the enthusiasm in his eyes, which were betraying the feelings he had. He could not believe he was where he was; he could not take for real he was given the opportunity of becoming a real part of the game. He said: “I am like a kid brought to a large toy store, and I do not know with which toy I should start playing…“.

During one of our chats he told me that in his home country, he has to bike 12 km from his house to the institute to have internet access. Something which is a forgotten thing for us, here in the rich West. But something which makes me deeply think. This is certainly something I will recall and consider during those days when nature is mute, there are no progresses, the research is stagnant, and the enthusiasm is running low.

There are still many things we can learn from young people.

After the Great Debate, I had a chat with Pavel Kroupa. Here follow some quotes from one of his emails:

“The Event was interesting, but it is clear that rational argumentation will not bring L-CDM followers into thinking otherwise. It is like with the searches for DM: if you do not find it then it obviously has other properties. And so our Local Volume (8 Mpc) and Local Group (about 2Mpc) cannot be used to test LCDM.   Well, if you subscribe to this, then we can just as well stop arguing and do more sensible things. ”

“Rob Sanders held a talk at our institute the following day, on MOND. And again, without being a MOND person,  I was simply stunned how very naturally MOND is solving all galactic-dynamics problems - how well it fits, and how all its predictions were verified. This talk was very well attended, and there were many questions, notably also from the L-CDM camp. So this may suggest that the young people are beginning to think. Rob states that the real falsification of L-CDM is due to the amazing success of MOND. I think he is right.”

“I read your Blog on the debate. Also reading Daniel Fischer’s Blog  it is my impression that the relevance of the Local Volume and Local Group failures are just not understood. If I or anyone else could see how normal/standard physics can resolve the failures, at least even in principle, then I wouldn’t have been in the debate!”

“I did bring in stellar ages right at the end of the open debate just before the end of the affair: If stars are found that are older than the nominal age of the universe according to the L-CDM model, then L-CDM is ruled out. So PLEASE, make sure you publish your paper.”

Indeed, after discussing a bit with Pavel, we are now working on a new version of the “Very Old Stars” paper, getting it ready for re-submission, probably to a different journal.

By the way, you can now enjoy the videos of the Great Debate here:

1) Presentation

2) 5 minutes summary

3) Debate

The Great Debate is over. In the next days you will be able to see it here. Although I had plenty of urgent things to do, I could not resist to follow the live blog by Marcel Pawlowski and Andreas Küpper, who kept reporting and answering questions for the whole duration of the debate. It was an interesting experience. From what I can judge, the presentation by Simon White was very relaxed, and did not touch upon possible alternative scenarios. After a general introduction on Dark Matter, White went through all evidences, including the famous Bullet Cluster. One of the points he made was that neutron and neutrino were predicted/invoked well before they were discovered. In particular, the neutrino was postulated in 1930, but confirmed only in 1956. Something similar might be happening for dark matter particles. DM was postulated by F. Zwicky in 1933, but the particle has not been found. At least not yet. For some time there were hopes that the neutrino could be the one, but with the mass limits set for it, there is not much neutrinos can do for DM.

The first slide by Pavel Kroupa (photo courtesy of M. Pawlowski). LCDM is ruled out

On the other hand, Pavel Kroupa started in a very bold way. His first slide carried an explicit title: “LCDM is Ruled Out” (LCDM stays for Lambda-Cold Dark Matter, i.e. the most favored cosmological model including cold dark matter and dark energy). The bloggers report that when the slide appeared there was a general laughter in the fully packed seminar room.

The main point made by Pavel is that LCDM does not agree with what we see in the so called local volume. In other words, the predictions of LCDM cosmologies on scales comparable to our neighborhoods (say, less than a million light years), are completely wrong when compared to what we actually see. And this, in Pavel’s opinion, is sufficient to rule out LCDM. Unless, he adds, we live within a very special bubble (which would bring us back to a sort of pre-Copernican age).

While he mentions MOND and MOG as alternative theories, he also touches upon the sociological aspects of the whole matter, and how difficult it is to go against the mainstream (in this respect I like to mention that a few days ago Pavel had written to me asking about the status of our very old stars paper, which you might remember got brutally but superficially rejected by A&A).

During the final debate, Simon White admits that LCDM has some problems, but he also points out that the small scale structure is not a problem at all, as this is complicated by other issues, which cannot be explained by a model that reproduces the large scales. Pavel Kroupa maintains that this is a catastrophe for LCDM (one of the two must probably be wrong, you’d say).

Watching the blog it was very interesting to see how different people reacted (online) to the various statements. Interestingly, a live poll launched by the bloggers on MOND concludes that for 72% of the voters this is a nice theory that needs to be improved. Only 12% thinks it does not make any sense to work on MOND, since we already have LCDM. I was under the impression that the blog audience was biased (probably anti-mainstream or non-aligned people attended the blog more frequently than LCDM-people, who considered it simply not worth).

Certainly an interesting and stimulating afternoon. However, there is a sentence that keept knocking on my mind the whole afternoon: “We do not understand nature. We measure it“. So says my brilliant friend Roberto Siagri. And, from time to time, I think he is right (more than ever when I ponder about astronomy). Think of the simple first law of motion: Every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force. We call it a law, a principle. From this (and other principles) we deduce everything else. The fact that the results are in agreement with what we see lead us to conclude that we understood how nature works. But the principles masquerade the very simple fact that we do not know, for instance, why every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion [...].

Or, for that matter, why two bodies attract each other with a force which is proportional to the product of the masses and bla bla bla. Sure, if you go along this path you will certainly end up asking the famous question why there is something rather than nothing. And, in turn, this will probably lead you/me/us nowhere. However, the fact that we do not know what pulls two bodies together, still remains. And somehow we have to cope with that.

This probably requires some healthy fraction of schizophrenia