Meetings

The “IAA Severo Ochoa Meeting: Addressing Key Astrophysical Questions from Granada”  will be held in Granada, from Tuesday October 18th, to Friday, October 21st, 2022. ​Our Severo Ochoa IAA Colloquium programme, was implemented in 2019 to allow senior staff from top level institutions to visit IAA to impart talks and work hands-on with our staff. It was timely transformed into web-loquia to circumvent the impossibility/difficulty for travelling due to Covid-19Due to COVID pandemics, and hence the online format was the rule. Being aware of the importance of interactions beyond the screen, we organise this 4-day meeting, where we plan to gather our web-loquium speakers and other internationally renowned researchers, with the aim of promoting the discussion with IAA scientists. The *morning sessions* will have around 4 keynote speakers each, and will be devoted to the topics:

• Day 1. Towards the understanding of planetary systems

• Day 2. Star formation in the Milky Way ond the local universe

• Day 3. Galaxy Formation and Evolution

• Day 4. State-of-the-art instrumentation and methodologies

The *afternoon sessions* will be devoted to discussions and in-depth interactions between the invited researchers and the IAA scientific staff. They will follow up the morning sessions with the aim to identify the related outstanding questions that can be tackled collaboratively with the IAA commnuity in the coming years.

MAAT* (Mirror-slicer Array for Astronomical Transients) is proposed as a visitor mirror-slicer optical system that will allow the OSIRIS spectrograph on the GTC the capability to perform Integral-Field Spectroscopy (IFS) over a seeing-limited field-of-view 14.20'' x 10'' with a slice width of 0.303''. MAAT will enhance the resolution power of OSIRIS by 1.6 times with respect to its 0.6'' wide long-slit. All the eleven OSIRIS Grisms and VPHs will be available to provide broad spectral coverage with low / moderate resolution (R=600 up to 4100) in the 360 - 1000 nm spectral range. MAAT top-level requirements will broaden its use to the needs of the GTC community for a wide range of outstanding science topics that covers the entire astronomy given its unique observing capabilities well beyond time-domain astronomy. The GTC equipped with OSIRIS+MAAT will also play a fundamental role in synergy with other facilities operating at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos. This 1-day workshop intends to collect the interest from the GTC community on MAAT. We will present the different aspects of the instrument, including science and technical specifications, and an outline of the instrument concept. Everyone is welcome to present key science projects that will encourage and support the development of this new facility.

The mapped J-PAS (Javalambre Physics of the accelerating universe Astrophysical Survey) will observe thousands of square degrees of the northern sky with a unique set of 56 filters (14 nm wide) in the optical range of the spectrum. J-PAS will provide high-quality photometric redshifts (~1000 km/s) for tens of millions of galaxies, and its legacy character will advance the fields of cosmology, galaxy evolution, and the study of the Milky Way. J-PAS will be carried out from the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory (OAJ, Teruel) with the Javalambre Survey Telescope (JST; 2.5m primary mirror) and the JPCam instrument (5 degrees square field of view).

While JPCam finishes its tuning at the OAJ, the JST telescope has already started the scientific operations thanks to the JPAS-Pathfinder first light camera (JPAS-PF). Throughout 2018, JPAS-PF@JST has mapped a square degree of the sky in the area of the Groth strip with the 56 filters of J-PAS and reaching the nominal photometric depth of the project.

The objective of this RIA Open Meeting is to present and make public this unique data set, release the reduced images and catalogs generated, demonstrate the capabilities of J-PAS with real data and motivate the scientific exploitation of the J-PAS project by the international astrophysical community.

The meeting will have a scientific-technical character, with sessions dedicated to present the observations, the reduction process, the calibration and the access to the data. There will also be sessions focused on the scientific exploitation of the first square degree of the J-PAS project, as well as on the identification and strengthening of synergies with other projects that have a significant Spanish presence and/or are carried out from other national astronomical ICTSs.

Ten years after the celebration of the First Workshop on robotic autonomous observatories in Málaga, the number of automatic astronomical facilities worldwide has significantly grown, as well as the level of robotisation, autonomy, and networking, with many recent developments motivated by the search of new electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves in the next months. This has a strong impact in many other astrophysical fields, like fireballs detection, minor planet studies, the search for extra-solar planets, the monitoring of variable stars in our Galaxy, the study of active galactic nuclei, the detection and monitoring of supernovae, and the immediate follow-up of high-energy transients such as cosmic gamma-ray bursts, besides the search of neutrino and gravitational waves electromagnetic counterparts. Last, but not least, space debris surveillance and tracking is another field of increasing interest. Educational aspects will be also covered.
Thus, the main focus of the workshop will be on the new and existing astronomical facilities whose goal is to observe a wide variety of
astrophysical targets with no (or very little) human interaction. As in the past 10 years, we expect the workshop will continue as an
international forum for researchers to summarize the most recent developments and ideas in the field, with a special emphasis given to
the Technical and Scientific results obtained within the last two years and future developments, with specific sessions on Educational
Activities and Space Surveillance and Tracking.

Specialized seminar, aimed mainly at researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA), interested in finding out about the possibilities of participation and financing within the MSCA Programme, and more specifically within the Individual Fellowship H2020-MSCA-IF-2019, of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020). The Seminar is divided into three blocks. The first two will fundamentally describe the objectives and main characteristics of the MSCA Actions, providing participants with information on which modality of the H2020-MSCA-IF-2019 call is most suitable for them. In the second block, the practical issues and success stories of MSCA projects awarded in the last calls will be addressed. In the last block, the entire application process will be carried out.

We invite all J-PAS members to the 17th J-PAS Collaboration Meeting. The meeting will focus on the science exploitation of pathfinder data, as well as on the preparation of the J-PAS survey strategy. The meeting will take place in the main lecture hall of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences (ICA), located in the main CSIC campus (Madrid). It will start on Monday the 20th of May, at lunch time, and finish on Thursday the 23rd.

The objective of this Seminar is to train IAA researchers interested in the preparation of a proposal for ERC Programme Calls. The aim is to provide the tools and key aspects, both theoretical and practical, to be taken into account when drafting a competitive proposal. The Seminar is divided into three blocks. In the first one, the main objectives and characteristics will be described. ERC (Starting, Consolidator, Advance or Synergy Grant) calls, providing information to participants on which modality of the call is most suitable for them according to eligibility criteria based on excellence, and in their research trajectory. In the last blocks, practical questions for the drafting and key elements in the evaluation of the proposal will be addressed.

In the last 20 years since the first planet was discovered, the search for and detection of Earth-like planets has become a dominant focus in exoplanetary and global research, allowing the number of discoveries to increase exponentially. The current sample is large enough to begin to understand how planetary systems similar to ours have formed and to assimilate that stars with planets in orbit are the rule, not the exception.

We have also begun to understand that these systems cover a great diversity in architecture, some very different from that of our own solar system, which also implies a diversity in their formation and evolution. Recently we have begun to investigate the atmospheres and internal structures of these extrasolar planets with the objective of finding and characterizing those that present analogies with our Earth.

Spain has only recently joined this field, but it has done so with reference contributions from both space and Earth. This is the case of the CARMENES project, co-led by Spain, which since 2016 is discovering planets and contributing to their characterization.

The objectives of the meeting are to present and update the community on the scientific and technical status of the CARMENES project, providing detailed information on the specifications of CARMENES, as well as on data management and policy and all the information needed to facilitate proposals, access to the instrument and analysis of data from Spanish groups interested in observing with CARMENES.

In addition, the meeting will allow us, both the consortium and the rest of the community groups, to present our research with CARMENES data, whether ongoing or published, as well as new ideas for using the instrument, with the aim of strengthening collaboration and synergies between projects.

Finally, the organization of this meeting in the same week and place as the Spanish Network of Exoplanets (Exonet) will facilitate the discussion of the future of CARMENES, as well as the community's interests in other similar instruments in which Spain is involved (ESPRESSO, HIRES)