2016 News

A virtual visit of the IRAM 30 meter telescope and its surroundings as well as spectacular aerial views of the observatory, located on Pico Veleta in the Spanish Sierra Nevada...

Combining the information from the ALMA interferometer and the IRAM 30-meter telescope, an international team of astronomers obtained the most detailed image of the Orion Bar, the frontier between the atomic and molecular gas in the closest massive star forming region from the solar system.

The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA) and IRAM, the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (Grenoble, France) have finalized the signature of a collaboration agreement in the area of Millimeter Astronomy and in particular for NOEMA, the Northern Extended Millimeter Array project. The agreement, which runs for five years, will serve to strengthen and accelerate the scientific and technological progress generated by NOEMA.

Through a unique combination of observations made by the largest telescopes in the world, an international collaboration led by researchers from the Astrophysics Department- AIM Laboratory of CEA-IRFU has detected the most distant galaxy cluster ever discovered in the Universe . Back 11.5 billion years in the past of the Universe, the snapshot of this cluster shows 17 galaxies in a strong starburst activity, a period of intense star formation. This is the first time such a structure, captured at the time of its formation, is detected as far away, when the universe was "only" 2.5 billion years.

An international team of astronomers from China, UK, and Canada has discovered an expanding molecular gas bubble surrounding the remnant of Tycho’s supernova with the IRAM 30-meter telescope. This is the very first unambiguous detection of an expanding bubble driven by the progenitor star of a Type Ia supernova, and an important clue to understanding the mysterious origin of this historical supernova and its remnant.

The spectral range from 71 to 80 GHz is of fundamental importance for a number of questions in the extragalactic and galactic research areas but, despite of this, is one of the few spectral windows that remained inaccessible to interferometers. While the IRAM 30m telescope started in the winter semester 2015/2016, after the EMIR upgrade offering the possibility to observe in this spectral window,

An international group of scientists from the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory (INAF-OAA, Florence, Italy), the Center of Astrobiology (CAB-CSIC, Madrid, Spain) and the Max-Plank Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE, Garching, Germany) has detected for the first time the prebiotic molecule P-O in star-forming regions. This molecule plays a key role in the double helix structure of DNA, and is therefore directly linked to the origin of life in the Universe.

NOEMA has seen the successful deployment of the 8th antenna early April with first fringes on all baselines detected only 10 days later on the 19th of April. The NOEMA project stays on track with the ambitious timescales for construction, commissioning and integration of its future antennas.

The 9th IRAM millimeter interferometry school will be held October 10th-14th 2016 at the IRAM headquarters (Grenoble, France). It is intended for students, post-docs and scientists who want to acquire a good knowledge of interferometry and data reduction techniques at millimeter wavelengths, with a special emphasis on the NOEMA interferometer.

NOEMA and IRAM 30-m radiotelescope observations have provided the very first detection of sulfur monoxide (SO) in a protoplanetary disk. The IRAM 30-m radiotelescope observations were performed in the frame of ASAI, an IRAM Large Program led by R.Bachiller (OAN/Spain) and B.LeFloch (IPAG/France). Follow up NOEMA observations were obtained by an international collaboration led by A.Fuente and S.Pacheco (OAN/Spain).

The IRAM Science Software team will present the projects that were developed in the past 5 years and the projects that will be delivered in the next few years.

NIKA 2, the second generation Neel-IRAM-KID-Array, is a dual band camera operating simultaneously at 150 and 260 GHz. The instrument is based on large arrays of superconducting Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KID) operated at temperatures of 100 mK. NIKA 2 is built by an international consortium, led by the Institute Neel (Grenoble France).

ALMA and IRAM-30m observations of carbon monoxide (CO) were used to determine a very low temperature of large dust grains in the disk around a young star in the Ophiuchus star forming region. These observations were conducted by an international team, led by a scientist at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux.