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Since July 2014, Calar Alto Observatory has a fireball detection station which is composed by five high sensitivity CCD cameras. These devices are monitoring the firmament during the whole night and allow automatic identification of meteoroids entering into our atmosphere. These meteoroids are falling material fragments from asteroids, comets or even other planets.
The systems installed at Calar Alto for the analysis of these interplanetary matter are part of the SMART project, developed under the scientific direction of Prof. José María Madiedo (Universidad de Huelva) in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC).
By clicking here you will go to the web page containing all the objects observed with this new system and with Calar Alto external surveillance webcams. That web page will be upgrade as soon as new fireballs are detected.
An exoplanet is confirmed for the first time using an instrument built by the Calar Alto Observatory. It is the first planet orbiting a giant star whose confirmation is beyond any doubt.
The planetary nature of an object orbiting the giant star KIC 8219268 has been confirmed by using the radial velocity technique and the Calar Alto Fiber-fed Echelle spectrograph (CAFE), the first instrument built by the Spanish-German Astronomical Center, in Almería, Spain. Researchers from the Center of Astrobiology (CAB, INTA-CSIC), the Max-Planck Institut für Astronomy (MPIA, MPG), Centro de Astrofisica e Departamento de Física e Astronomia (Universidade do Porto), Instituto de Astronomía (UNAM) and from Calar Alto (CAHA), in Spain, Germany, Portugal and Mexico have applied this well understood methodology and have obtained a mass similar to Jupiter. The planet, named Kepler-91b, is located extremely close to the star. This is the first planet ever confirmed based on data acquired from Calar Alto Observatory.
The dome of the 3.5-metre telescope at Calar Alto Observatory today hosted the launch of CALIFA and CARMENES, two international projects that are benchmarks in their respective fields.
Researchers from the Planetary Sciences Group of the Basque Country University (UPV/EHU) unveil some secrets of Saturn’s mysterious hexagonal wave, among them its rotational period, that may be the rotation period of the planet itself. The study, published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, has been based on data taken at Calar Alto Observatory and by the space probe Cassini…
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