Jordi Torra i Roca, Barcelona, 23/04/1949 – 26/02/2019
Ph.D. in Physics by the Universitat de Barcelona (1984) and Professor in the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics in the same University, he focused his research career in the study of the structure, formation and evolution of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. He was one of the pioneers at European level in the development of the field of Astrometry from Space. In the 80s he accepted the challenge to lead the Spanish participation in the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos mission and, as a result from this work, Spain is fully participating in the Gaia mission, launched in 2013 and...
read moreGaia detects a shake in the Milky Way
Image: The spiral shape of fig 1c of our article appears inside an old watch symbolising the fact that these data has allowed us to date back the perturbation that shook the Milky Way disk. This figure shows how from the new obtained Gaia data we can know more about the past of the Galaxy. Credit: Edmon de Haro/iStock. Researchers of the UB and the University of Groningen lead one of the first big discoveries from the Gaia Mission, published in Nature A team led by researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB, UB-IEEC) and the...
read moreGaia Second Data Release Event in Barcelona.
[UPDATED] See the event video here or at our YouTube channel On Wednesday 25 April 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) publish the second data release of the Gaia mission. The team of researchers from the Universitat de Barcelona (ICCUB/IEEC) organises an event open to the general public in the Faculty of Physics (Av. Diagonal 647, Barcelona) where the new data will be presented and the new era in astronomy that it begins will be described. Gaia: a billion stars in movement Gaia Second Data Release Event Aula Magna Enric Casasses, Facultad de Física, Universitat de Barcelona Wednesday 25...
read moreOpening of the Gaia Archive
A media briefing is being organised by ESA at the ILA Berlin Air and Space Show in Germany, on Wednesday 25 April 2018. You can find all the information about the event organized around the opening of the Gaia Archive in the link below, as well as the streaming info. The opening will take place at 12:00h. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Gaia/Call_for_media_Second_data_release_from_ESA_s_Gaia_mission
read moreGaia tops one trillion observations
On 14 April 2018, about 10 days before the second Gaia Data Release, the spacecraft and daily data processing systems have reached yet another stunning milestone: the number of star transits has reached 100 billion! The Gaia satellite has two telescopes pointing to two regions of the sky separated by 106.5 degrees. The satellite spins at a rate of 6 hours per revolution with the two telescopes scanning a great circle and the stars continuously transiting the focal plane. Every day, Gaia instruments record about 70 million transits. A full transit includes an observation in the sky mapper (to...
read moreGaia DR2 bulk catalogue available in FAPEC format
The Gaia group at the Universitat de Barcelona (IEEC – ICCUB), in cooperation with DAPCOM Data Services S.L. (a technological spin-off company of the UPC and the UB), has published an alternative copy of the bulk data files from Gaia DR2 – the second data release from Gaia. Gaia DR2 was published on 25 April 2018. Besides the on-line catalogue, bulk CSV files were also made available for download – an interesting option for exhaustive analyses. Such files are officially offered in “csv.gz” format, that is, compressed with the widely known gzip compressor. On 6...
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