Category: Supernovae

Supernovae

October 18, 2011

Rock Star Paul Young encounters the Stars @ ESO

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 ...

October 4, 2011

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 goes to Supernovae!

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 ...

September 19, 2010

Exploding Stars in Leiden

Just arrived in Leiden. Tomorrow, at the Lorentz Center, an international workshop on Supernova explosions will start. It will focus on the progenitors of one specific class of SNe, called Type Ia. They became famous because of the implications they ...

September 1, 2010

A walk into the desert

A view of the desert from Paranal's residencia This is now the 8th night of this run at the Very Large Telescope. I have been observing at Kueyen, the second 8.2m unit telescope (UT2 for friends). At the moment ...

December 22, 2009

Stellar Death

When I was close to the end of my Master in Astronomy at the University of Padua, I do not exactly remember why I decided to do my thesis work on Supernovae, under the supervision of prof. Roberto Barbon. So, ...

November 26, 2009

Catastrophic Explosions seen through Interstellar Clouds

I realized that I never wrote about my scientific research (which actually is one of the two sides of my professional life, the other being my functional duties for the European Organization for Astronomical Research). As you may have noticed ...

November 17, 2009

A bright optical transient in NGC300 or “how to put and end to a nice vacation”

Last year, while spending a nicely warm morning in Northern Italy, I got a phone call from Avik Harutyunyan, a post-doc working in La Palma at the Italian National Telescope "Galileo". He was quite excited. The discovery of a ...

July 7, 2009

A visit to Oxford

Working at ESO gives great professional and social opportunities. Being at the center of European experimental astronomy, is the place where many new and exciting things take place. For this reason it attracts scientists and engineers from all over the ...

December 10, 2008

Light echo allows astronomers to type a 400 years old supernova

Taking advantage of the light echo phenomenon, an international team of astronomers has been able to observe the spectrum of a supernova exploded 400 years ago, and it was able to determine its type.