Today i did the 18th #Bike2Work ride.
It was 19°C and cloudy, no wind at all. Very wet since it stopped raining an hour before the ride. I was very lucky for once 😁 I did track C-K (22.5km, 280m ascend).
After these 10 days of stop (well i trained anyway, but not commuted) i felt in great condition. Plus, every time it's wet or raining it's like i have a boost or something...so i destroyed the last year PR by 5 minutes! 😲
My colleague Cristina García-Miró took some pictures about my talk on Monday. I spoke mostly about the engineering and programmatic updates from the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade, and the teams behind it. Sean’s talk today (see link) focuses on the advantages of the WSU to astronomers.
Protecting ALMA’s skies Whitepaper: a study of the risks posed by radio frequency interference (RFI) to ALMA today and in the near future, from both ground-based and space-based sources of radio emissions. The paper identifies the vulnerable points eof the observatory, and discusses and evaluates potential mitigation measures.
🌋 Io: New image of a lake of fire, signs of permanent volcanism
—Ars Technica
「 By combining the imaging power of lots of smaller telescopes scattered across a plateau, ALMA is able to spot regional differences in the presence of specific elements in Io's atmosphere, as well as identify different isotopes of those elements 」
ALMA, as part of the Event Horizon Telescope, is unveiling a new image of our Milky Way's supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, in which strong magnetic fields can be seen…
The most exciting part is that this hints to a jet that would be hidden from our vantage point in our galaxy… but imagine that! We might be like M87, just at a smaller scale!
Happy to have been an ally to my female colleagues sharing some past experience that we believed at SKAO to be helpful to getting better candidates: just ask for what the position really needs, don’t look for unicorns.
[Le Monde] - #EauxEnBouteille : l’association Foodwatch porte plainte à la suite de la révélation de traitements interdits.
Elle va saisir la justice en raison de la révélation du recours massif à des techniques de purification illégales sur des eaux vendues comme « de source » ou « minérales naturelles ». Sa plainte vise les géants agroalimentaires #Nestlé et #Alma, mais aussi le gouvernement français pour sa gestion de l’affaire.
Brains have the alpha waves, computers have their clocks... and radio telescopes have hydrogen masers (essentially, radio-wavelength lasers) to keep both accurate timing and frequency, which are essential for radio inteferometers such as ALMA to work.
This masers live at 5000 m high at the Chajnator plateau, so the work itself is challenging!