Researcher at the Max Planck Institute gave a workshop on software management for applications in radio astronomy

straight from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Munich, Germany, the Dr. Elena Redaelligave a workshop for the community of the Department of Astronomy of the University of Concepción, aimed at managing the GILDAS software library, used in millimeter and submillimeter radio astronomy applications.

The activity organized by the researcher and the director of the Master in Astronomy and member of the CATA, Dr Stefano Bovino, takes place within the framework of the Eso-Mixto visit project “Visit of Dr. Elena Redaelli to strengthen and boost the collaboration among MPE and Chilean Institutions”. This project arises in turn from the collaboration between both professionals to work on the ALMA data of star formation regions.

Specifically, the astronomer instructed in general the handling of GILDAS, to then focus on the CLASS software. This section is responsible for reducing the data from single dish radio telescopes (with only one antenna) such as IRAM in Spain or APEX del Llano de Chajnantor in northern Chile.

“The idea was teach the participants to receive the information directly from the telescope, open it, analyze it and save it, so that a scientific product can emerge that can be published. We took data that I had previously used in my astrochemistry publications, analyzes of star-forming regions, molecular clouds, etc.,” he said.

Multiple investigations benefited from the training

There were two groups that lived two days of training each, which demonstrates the great interest of the community to deepen their knowledge of software and data analysis for future improvements in their research and scientific publications.

In fact, several of the students are currently working on data from the radio telescope APEX in conjunction with different professors, who study galaxies, star formation regions, among others. In case of future research, CLASS will also serve as a basis for the analysis of the data obtained by the Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT).

The astronomer from the Max Planck Institute thus highlights the interest and participation of the undergraduate and graduate students, professors and postdoctoral fellows who participated in the workshop. One of them was the student of the Master of Science with a Mention in Physics and member of the Center for Astronomical Instrumentation (CePIA), Gonzalo Burgos Fuentes.

“The activity seemed super functional. Elena showed that she knew what she was doing and got right to the point; we started in a general way, what can be used and what to do, then she talked about the basic commands and how to pass them to scripts, automated codes that apply the functions. This is how we went from reducing one image to six, or eight”, commented Gonzalo.