Calar Alto Colloquium 2006
 
Granada, April 25th-26th  

Abstracts


A. Campo Bagatin, G. Bernabeu Pastor, P.G. Benavidez, B. Gladman

Recovering CFEPS Peculiar Outer Solar System Objects.

The Canadian France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS) is performing the first bias-free Ecliptic Survey for trans-nepunian objects. Because of its acquisition in survey mode, the Legacy project also identifies objects with peculiar orbital characteristics whose discovery and/or orbits need to be confirmed (2004XR190 "Buffy" – an object of the survey with almost circular orbit (e=0.1), and inclination of 47 deg– is a typical example of those objects). We wish to be able to observe particularly interesting objects who are discovered by the CFEPS  but that cannot be re-observed by the consortium before they are lost behind the Sun after their discovery opposition. Imaging such objects is crucial in order not to lose them and to be able to determine their orbit well enough to find them again the following year. Typical magnitud range for these objects is 22.0 to 23.5 in R, even if some brighter (21.0-21.5) object may also be in our survey. The Calar Alto telescopes (2.2m and especially 3.5m) are the suitable facilities to recover the most peculiar among the survey objects.


S. Catalán Ruiz

Constraining the initial-to-final mass relationship with common proper motion pairs.
 
The initial-to-final mass relationship is currently poorly constrained due to the fact that high loss-mass processes that occur in stars in the AGB phase are still not well understood. A promising approach to diminish the uncertainties is to study white dwarfs for which external constraints are available. In our case we have chosen common proper motion pairs, since we can infer some important information of the white dwarf, such as the metallicity of its progenitor, from the study of the companion, which should be the same, since they were born at the same time. It is important to remark that the other star should be of type F, G or K, since their physical properties can be determined to high accuracy from stellar models.

Here, we report spectroscopic observations of both members of several common proper motion pairs composed of a main sequence star and a white dwarf. We used the TWIN single-slit and FOCES echelle spectrographs to obtain low and  high resolution spectra for the white dwarf and companion members, respectively. From the fitting of the absorption lines to theoretical models we obtain the effective temperature and the surface gravity of the white dwarf member and, consequently, its mass and cooling times. In the near future, the determination of the metallicity of the main sequence companion will help us to infer the metallicity of the progenitor of the white dwarf. This procedure will allow us to estimate the main sequence lifetime of the white dwarf, and hence, to determine the total age  of the system. At this point, we will be able to derive the mass of the main sequence progenitor of the  white dwarf and better establish the initial-to-final mass relationship.


L. M. Lara, H. Boehnhardt, R. Gredel, P. J. Gutiérrez, R. Rodrigo, M. J. Vidal-Núñez 

The comet 9P/Tempel 1 as seen from Calar Alto during the Deep Impact event.

In this talk, we will review the results obtained from Calar Alto Observatory during the Deep Impact event.
As the wrap-up of the monitoring started on January 2005 (Lara et al. 2006, A&A 2006, pp.1151-1157), we observed the comet 9P/Tempel 1 from July 1 to 12 doing CCD broadband imaging and long-slit spectroscopy by using CAFOS mounted at the 2.2 m telescope. The impact itself (July 4, 05:52 UT) could not be observed from CA but its aftermaths were followed and characterised for 9 days (that is, about two comet rotations). In this line, for the pre and post impact phases, we will show
  1. gas and (approximate) dust production rates, including the most immediate effects of the impact,
  2. morphological analysis of the dust coma and its implications,  and
  3. characteristics of the dust.
We want to give special thanks to J. Aceituno, A. Aguirre, M. Alises, N. Cardiel, A. Guijarro, F. Hoyo, S. Pedraz, S. Sánchez,  U. Thiele at Calar Alto Observatory without their engagement and dedication this unique program (long term global monitoring of the Deep Impact target) would not have been successful.


Irini Sakelliou

XMM-Newton and LAICA observations of the merging cluster system Abell 399/401.

It is now common wisdom that structures in the Universe are formed hierarchically, by merging of smaller mass units.  During these violent merging events, processes take place that modify the properties of the constituents of clusters [i.e. intracluster medium (ICM), galaxies], that define their subsequent evolution.

In order to derive the properties of the ICM and the cluster galaxies, and to assess the significance of galaxy-cluster interactions, we have observed in X-ray and optical wavelenghts the merging binary cluster system Abell 399/401. The X-ray data were obtained by the XMM-Newton satellite, while the optical data are from the LAICA detector on the Calar Alto observatory.  To our knowledge, Abell 399/401 is the only simple merging system: the merging is happening on the plane of the sky; it is at early stages of interactions; there is a compression wave in-between the two clusters; it does not appear to reside in a dense supercluster.

In this talk, I will present the XMM-Newton and LAICA mosaics and the comparison of the  distributions of the hot gas and cluster galaxies will be discussed.


Jorge Pérez Gallego

3D Spectroscopy of local luminous compact blue galaxies.

Luminous Compact Blue Galaxies (LCBGs) are high surface brightness galaxies, bluer than a typical SBc and birghter than 0.25L*, which are undergoing a major burst of star formation. LCBGs are the closest counterpart of the numerous population of starburst galaxies at intermediate and high redshift, including Lyman-break galaxies at z~2. Two teams, one at UF (PI: R. Guzm\'an) and another at UCM (PI: J. Gallego) have now joined efforts with one single goal: to produce a complete and unique characterization of the nature of the nearby LCBG galaxy population. We have selected a representative sample of LCBGs from the SDSS, UCM and MRK catalogs which provides an excellent reference for characterizing LCBGs as a class and comparison with current and future surveys of similar starbursts at higher redshift. We are carrying out a 3D optical spectroscopic study of this LCBG sample as part of an ambitious multiwavelenth program which goes from FUV (GALEX) to cm (VLA). 3D spectroscopy provides spatially resolved maps of kinematics, extinction, SFR and metallicity, in order to characterize their star formation history and mass assembly, and the role of mergers and supernova galactic winds. We present results from data taken at the 3.5-m telescope with PPAK in CAHA. We use these data to simulate integrated rest-frame optical spectra of high redshift starburst galaxies using the new generation of IR multi-object spectrographs, such as EMIR at the GTC and, eventually, NIRMOS at the TMT.


Sebastián F. Sánchez

Progress in IFS at Calar Alto: Reduction pipelines, dithering and Mosaicing. 

We present here the last developments on IFS achive at CAHA using PMAS at the 3.5m (Roth et al. 2005). We introduce the users to R3D, a package for reducing fiber-fed IFS data of any of this kind of IFUs. It has been demonstrated to propertly reduce PMAS data on the LArr and PPAK modes, but also VIMOS, INTEGRAL and GMOS data. We will show some examples, indicating the possible solutions to cross-talk and sky subtraction, intrinsic problems to this kind of technique. We will also show our experiments on 3D dithering, to enhance the instrumental spatial resolution of the instrument, and 3D Mosaicing, to increase the initial field-of-view and use IFUs as survey machines, indicating the problems of both techniques.


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