Our GEEMAS colleagues Amparo Marco e Ignacio Negueruela visited CAB-masivas in June 2019. During their visit we progressed on EMIR data-reduction and common projects on B-hypergiants and massive X-ray binaries.
Massive star people and Don Quixote: “They are no wind-mills but hypergiants!!”.
An international team including Paco Najarro has confirmed, for the first time, the presence of large molecules that resemble tiny soccer balls in the interstellar medium. High signal-to-noise HST-STIS spectra taken towards different lines of sight, all backlit by massive stars, have detected the weak predicted DIBs caused by the ionized C60 Buckmisnterfullerene.
Check on NASA’s press release here. The main journal paper is available here.
Sexants-A image taken in the V-band (from the Local Group survey), with the map of neutral hydrogen overlaid (from LITTLE THINGS). Orange squares mark the location of OB-type stars.
The CAB+IAC team lead by Miriam Garcia is drilling Sextans-A in pursuit of the population of massive stars. Our latest result is striking: we found the youngest, most massive stars known to date in the very outskirts of the galaxy!
Paco Najarro partipated in the Cycle of talks “Hablemos de Física” organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He shared his view on the Milky Way’s central blackhole and surrounding population of massive stars. The talk is available offline here.
The US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine carried out the Astro2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, in order to identify the big research challenges of the next decade, and the technology needed to tackled them. CAB-masivas led a white paper on metal-poor massive stars, crucial objects to understand star formation accross Cosmic History and other relevant objects such as Gravitational Wave progenitors. The next breakthrough on metal-poor massive stars requires a large telescope in space with UV capabilities, such as LUVOIR.