The Aragonese Centre for Physics Studies of the Cosmos (CEFCA) is organizing a virtual scientific meeting in order to report results and analyses from a project that seeks to map out a portion of the night sky and present the findings in a catalogue to the international community. The meeting, which will be attended by 70 scientists and more than 20 institutions from six countries has started today and will conclude on 5 November.
J-PLUS is a multi-level project with participation from local, regional, national and European funds
The name of the collaborative project is J-PLUS, which stands for The Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey. Javalambre refers to the name of the observatory, located in the mountains of southern Aragon, in the Province of Teruel.
The starlight device of that project is the JAST/T80 telescope (seen on the photo) which is used to provide the mapping data. This data will be released during the virtual conference under the form of a catalogue on the project data portal.
This includes observations made since the end of 2015 and covering an area of 2200 square degrees of the sky. The catalogue contains 19.5 million objects, of which 6 million are galaxies and the rest are stars. There are measurements of more than a thousand parameters per object, including photometric measurements, temperature, metallicity and distance calculations between galaxies.
“We are very satisfied with the amount of work presented. The variety of contributions shows the transversality of the data provided by the telescope to carry out research in different niches in the field of astronomy,” said Dr Carlos López San Juan, CEFCA researcher and scientific coordinator of the J-PLUS project.
The large amount of new data is important for the scientific community and helps them out in their research towards revealing the mysteries of the Universe. It was reported that already 14 scientific articles had been published for studies led or collaborated with by CEFCA scientists. Several dozens of others are in the process of preparation.
Source: TheMayor.EU
