2010 News

At the IRAM 30-meter radio telescope, near Granada in Spain, a team of astronomers stumbled upon a totally unexpected celestial source in the course of a program designed to search for debris, in the form of cold dust, left by the formation of planets around nearby stars.

The next IRAM 30m Summer School will be held from 23 to 30 September 2011 at Pradollano (Sierra Nevada). The school is aimed at attracting new astrophysicists to current and future single-dish mm-, submm-, and far-infrared telescopes. Applications will be accepted from young scientists with little previous experience in mm-astronomy.

The IRAM program committee convened in Grenoble on October 14 and 15 to evaluate the proposals submitted for the winter 2010/2011 scheduling period. The discussions were organized in 3 panels which were chaired by Santiago Garcia-Burillo (OAN, Madrid), Bertrand Lefloch (LAOG, Grenoble), and Asuncion Fuente (OAN, Madrid).

Covering the period from December 2010 to May 2011, this year’s second proposal deadline for IRAM facilities will be on September 14, 2010. As usual, the submission facility will be opened about three weeks before the deadline.

Due to the exceptional circumstances caused by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, the IRAM program committee this time convened by telephone conference between Granada, Grenoble, Paris, Leiden, Bonn, Heidelberg and Garching on April 20 and 21 to discuss the proposals submitted for the summer 2010 scheduling period.

We are pleased to announce that the new correlator for the Plateau de Bure Interferometer, WideX, has successfully been installed during the last few months, and is now fully operational. This new correlator, by quadrupling the available bandwidth, provides a two-fold increase in both the continuum sensitivity and the instantaneous spectral coverage.

From November 29th to December 1st 2010, the IRAM node of the European ALMA Regional Center will organize a practical workshop on how to plan and analyze ALMA Early Science observations. The goal of the workshop is to provide the practical information needed to plan ALMA Early Science observations and answer the first Call for Proposals.

IRAM will organize this year its 7th Millimeter Interferometry School. These schools are organized every two years since 1998. The 7th school will take place at the IRAM headquarters (Grenoble, France) on October 4-8th, 2010.

The call for proposals for the summer semester 2010 is now online!

An international group of astronomers has used millimeter observations with the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer to demonstrate that a few billion years after the Big Bang normal, massive star forming galaxies like the proto-Milky Way had five to ten times more cold gas than today. “We have been able, for the first time...

For the first time, scientists were able to localize water in a disk around a young, solar-type star. The disks in which astronomers suppose planets to form, basically consist of gas and dust grains. Observations with the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer have now shown that these proto-planetary disks can contain amounts of water about 100 times more than the content of Earth's oceans...