Wednesday Colloquium



07.03.2012

"ACTA, SOPA, CETA, and even PIPA & CIPA. Untangling some four-letter acronyms"

Krzysztof Leszczyński (Polish Linux Users' Group)

Last year we witnessed several attempts to regulate the intellectual properties laws in the age of technology. National and internation parliaments released several regulations—Acts, hence the suffix A. This is a probably a begin of long-term process of discussion and battles on untangling the term of intangible properties.


14.03.2012

"OCRA - One Centimeter Receiver Array program on 32m Torun Radio Telescope. Hevelius 90m Radio Telescope - chances and challenges"

Andrzej Kus (Astronomical Center, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń)

One of the fundamental issues on CMB observational cosmology is to detaily describe radiation contribution from all known objects on the way - the foregrounds. These are local Galaxy extended and desecrate sources as well as extragalactic starburst and AGNs. Various identified effects, which change or could change intensity, spectrum or polarization of relict photons have to be considered and accounted for. The evolution of galaxies at high redshift, by itself is an interesting and challenging problem, thus the studies of weak (in sense of luminosity) and also most distant objects can illuminate some of the unknowns. Physical properties of radio sources and their cosmological evolution and variability have serious implications on reliability of CMB anisotropy. To study this population the OCRA system has been designed/built and installed on 32m RT in Piwnice. In this seminar the description of the OCRA project will be presented and the obtained observational results on radio sources at 30 GHz (1 cm wavelength) evaluated in general context of the foregrounds. Second part of the seminar will update information on activities to build in Poland 90m class radio telescope. The proposed instrument is a world class, the unique - wide field, extremely broadband radio camera to conduct radio surveys of the sky in cm (1,5 - 10) range and contribute to European VLBI Network. Other programs like pulsar studies, radio spectroscopy, polarimetry will be run in parallel continuously. Basics of construction and proposed research will be presented. The project is going to be financed from Regional European Infrastructure Funds and is not competing with any other proposal vital for Polish astronomy.


21.03.2012

"The enigma of CK Vul - the oldest 'nova'"

Marcin Hajduk (Astronomy Center, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń)

The star has not been observed since its outburst in 1670-1672. The remnants of the outburst had been found in 1982. The nature of CK Vul remains unknown. Proposed hypotheses include a nova scenario, very late thermal pulse and stellar merger. We studied the object using new observations of the nebula and the field stars.


28.03.2012

"KEPLER observations of RR Lyrae-type stars"

Paweł Moskalik (Copernicus Astronomical Center, Warsaw)

I will present newest observations of RR Lyrae-type stars. obtained with the KEPLER space telescope. Thanks to unprecedented quality of the data, new phenomena have been discovered. The emerging picture of the RR Lyrae-type pulsators is much richer and more complex than recognized before.