Thanks!

The conference is over, and everyone has returned home! Thanks again to the organizers for a stupendously well organized conference!

In Catania: Airport operating normally

All flights are leaving on time. I'm on my 7:30am to Milan as I write
this, with no delays. Safe travels, everyone!

Update on Catania Airport Closure

According to the Catania Airport website, the airport is closed until 6am (morning) Friday May 13th.


However, according to the Eurocontrol website Catania airport is closed to incoming flights (but not outgoing) until 4pm (afternoon) CORRECTION: 0400 UTC Friday May 13th. I do not know how this information is rectified.

In Catania: photos of eruption

At the webpage linked below you can download the photos taken by Michael Gabler last night, from the city center and from somewhere near the Rifugio Sapienza (cable-car station).

Just click on "Free downloading", wait 60 seconds and again "download the file".

Congratulation to the photographer!

Eruption photos

O. Benhar: Many-body aspects in the physics of Compact Stars

A question put to the speaker: "What one thing would you like astrophysicists to take home from your talk?"

His response: It is tough to to study r-modes from neutron stars when you take the
equation of state from one dynamical model,
thermodynamic properties from another dynamical model, and
energy gaps and critical temperatures from a third dynamical model.

Etna Eruption

We are coming close to the end of the Compstar meeting and Etna volcano decides to erupt. Here is a couple of pictures taken by Michael Gabler.

Thursday: Mt. Etna closes airport until at least noon

At midnight last night, Mt. Etna erupted, visible from downtown Catania, according to students at the conference.

The eruption has closed the Catania aiport until at least noon today. Visitors may wish to investigate alternative transport and lodging to accommodate this. Since it's impossible to predict eruptions, and how long it will take to re-open the airport, visitors should be proactive about alternative plans.

EDIT: if you have any additional information about this, please add it to comments below. Thanks!

1:00pm Update The airport is now closed until at least 4:00pm, because wind is blowing ash across the runways. This will severely delay flights throughout the day.

2:19pm Update EUROZONE, which distributes information on European airport closings and status via its twitter feed.

In Catania: Camelot

The conference dinner is just beginning.

At INFN: Gravastars (poster by A. Marunovic)

I advise everyone to check out this work, postered by Anja Marunovic:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.3537

How many of you are familiar with gravastars, as alternative to black holes?

M. Punturo: Overview of Gravitational Wave Detectors

Impressive and funny talk about the state-of-art of the gravitational wave detectors. We learnt that, among many background sources, human beings are very noisy! The review was funny and useful for a theoretical-oriented audience.

The fate of neutron stars couples

About half of neutrons stars live in couple, the other half are single. A good news for single neutron stars which are desperately seeking for a partner is that they might find one at any time, especially if they live in a globular cluster. However, most of neutron stars couples are born together, maybe not a the same time, but their parents were already close friends.

Neutron stars couples live happy and spend most of their time dancing together. They never rest, never stop, although everything should have an end...

For pure neutron star couples, for which both partners are neutron stars, the end of their love story is a gigantic event! They are so in love and they are merging both together, making a big firework for a few seconds, emitting huge gravitational waves that humans being try to record on Earth, and disappearing as a single black hole forever...

A short romantic story freely inspired by the talk of talk of F. Pannarale on "The dynamics of compact binary inspirals and mergers".

In Catania: Caffè del Duomo

Late nights out in Piazza Duomo.

David Alvarez-Castillo: Crust-core transition

He will close the first afternoon session.

But... still the slides are missing: "You're crazy" the chairman (D. Blaschke) said. Ok, he has USB key. He is speaking now, let us listen to him! :)

In Catania: One word description of the restaurant where you ate last night.

All from different conference attendees:

Fishy. Expensive. Pretentious. Marvelous. Pizzeria.
Make-yourself. Nice. Delicious. Amazing. Italian. Pizza. Delayed.
Cheap. Empty. Arancino. Eatable. Hotel. Delizioso. Mensa. Nearby.
Good. Fresh. Cozy. Al Dente. Vkusno. Memorable.

At Catania: Comparison of different Many-Body Technics

Arnau Rios presented in a brillant talk a comparison of different many-body technics such as FHNC, MC, BHF, SCGF, RG, ... And we learned that there is still a lot of work to be done at the level of the many-body technics that does not converge to the same results using a unique and simple interaction.

The many-body people have therefore still to work, and especially the speaker whose technic still needs a big improvement to be used at zero temperature !

The first step towards the setup of the dense matter CompStar EoS is made, and calls for many more !

Manuel Malheiro: Magnetars are White Dwarfs

A simple idea to solve some puzzles regarding magnetars: can a magnetized fast-spinning white dwarf explain the magnetars properties without invoking magnetic field decay of NSs as main energy source? Many discussions have followed its talk. My personal opinion: original idea, but I do not think it can work.

Anyway check their paper (Malheiro, Rueda, Ruffini 2011) here.

In Catania... or... above Catania?

Photo by Paolo Nespoli courtesy NASA/ESA

At COMPSTAR: cooling of hybrid stars and CAS A

David Blaschke is presenting an 'in preparation' work in which he fits the cooling curve of CAS A to his medium cooling scenario

At COMPSTAR: neutrino cooling and CAS A

Topical lecture by Dmitry Yakovlev on neutrino processes in NS with a particular focus on superfluidity related effects (e.g. CPF, suppression of neutrino cooling due to superconducting core protons) immediately followed by a presentation and a discussion of recent results (i.e. fast cooling that could be taken as evidence of core superfluidity onset) on CAS A by P. Shternin.

After the coffee break CAS A will be again at the very centre of the scene as David Blaschke will show that superfluids core neutrons are not the only explanation. 


Review on Neutrino processes:

• Yakovlev et al 2000

More details on CAS A:

• Shternin et al 2011
• Page et al 2011

In Catania: Shuttle

Summer school students (and Jim Lattimer) shuttle from central Catania
to the INFN at the University, each morning.

After Compstar: Looking for something to bring back home ?

What about a comic strip from Hugo Pratt and his famous Corto Maltese ?

Wiki : Hugo Eugenio Pratt (June 15, 1927 – August 20, 1995) was an Italian comic book creator who was known for combining strong storytelling with extensive historical research on works such as Corto Maltese. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2005.

At INFN: Nick Stirgioulas

Talks about collapsing neutron stars in computational relativity.

At INFN: Summer School Sessions

Fabrizio Grill and Anna Snopek wait for the afternoon summer school
session to begin.

At INFN: Viewing Stats

Of all the hits we've had since the blog first opened (300), Most viewers are here in Italy (211) as you might expect (here at the conference), followed by US (19), Portugal (17), and Poland (16) -- Russia is here too (with 2)! Welcome, visitors from all over the globe.

Jim Lattimer: proto-neutron stars

Jim is giving us a good overview regarding the formation of proto-neutron stars, describing also the physical processes involved in the cooling.

Jim's page

At INFN: On the radius

It's time to catch up with Physics. As Watts mentioned about mass measurements
Illarionov open his mouth and asked the uncomfortable question. What about radius? And he got to face the truth: that we don't have precise measurements at all. And it's because basically no optical telescope can resolve such a small, distant object. It has to be derived in an indirect way by any astrophysical process and since usually the radius comes together with the mass (compactness parameter: the mass to ratio quotient) the situation becomes hard. But there's a hope: gravitational waves. By measuring gravitational wave emissions from star oscillation is possible to get a good number for the radius. In contrast the mass values are well determined mainly by binary systems, as shown in this figure.

At INFN: Detector Mesh for Nuclear Repository (DMNR) project

Very interesting project lead by Paolo Finocchiaro in Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (Southern National Laboratories) in Catania INFN. A simple idea to measure radioactivity from nuclear waste storage, coming from nuclear, technological and medical applications. Check this out:

http://www.lns.infn.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=388&Itemid=215

At INFN: Discussing Gravitational Waves

Giuseppe Pagliara, Ariana Carbone, Giuseppe Colucci and Daniel
Zablocki discuss Ferrari's morning talk.

In Catania: a very good dinner

I advise you "Al cavalier Roxy", near Castello Ursino in Catania, where yesterday we enjoy a very rich meal! Many kinds of horse meat!

http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g187888-d2049714-Reviews-Al_Cavalier_Roxy-Catania_Sicily.html

At INFN: Lunch

Christian Krüger (Southampton) enjoys pizzetta at lunch.

At INFN: Our intrepid organizers

Hans-Josef Schulze, Marcello Baldo, Fiorella Burgio, enjoying morning coffee.

At INFN: How to rely micro and macro physics ?

This morning Valeria Ferrari explained us that by linearizing the Einstein eqs and choosing a suitable function, one get a Schrödinger like eq. That's fantastic !

At INFN: Southampton physicists represent

Listening to Valeria Ferrari's lecture on Gravitational Wave Emission
from Compact Stars.

In Catania: Tango in Piazza Duomo

Jim Lattimer, Nick Stergioulas and I happened upon public tango. They went at it through 1am on Wednesday night. A great scene, and well worth visiting even if you don't tango yourself. Thanks Nick for the photograph!

Introducing: Lucy Keer

Evening all! I'm Lucy Keer, as you have no doubt worked out from the post title,

and this is my first ever blog post...

I'm a second year PhD student at the University of Southampton, UK, and I'm

working on modelling neutron star oscillations from starquakes, with a

view to looking at gravitational wave emission.

The school has been very enjoyable so far (I say this now that I am recovered

from testing my very limited coding skills to the limit this afternoon!)

and I look forward to keeping an eye out for anything interesting or amusing

to add to the blog.

Introducing: David Alvarez-Castillo

Yes it is. I am also joining this blog and keep you informed about the CompStar event 2011 and hopefully also entertained with all that happens around here. For those who don't know me already I'm a PhD student located in the Nuclear Physics Institute in Cracow (Poland) who's been learning about NS and following the CompStar previous meetings. Just keep in touch if you will!

Introducing: Jérôme Margueron

Hello World !

I am working @ Orsay (France) and I will try (!?) to blog on the importance of being a micro-physicist among neutron star's practitioners !

Keep connected !

The hunter

Arecibo - Costa Rica

Parkes - AU

Green Bank - USA

Which telescope has been the best Radio Pulsar chaser in the world so far? We have three candidates: Arecibo (300 m fixed antenna also featuring as guest actor in 'Contact' with Jody Foster), Green Banks (100 m swinging antenna in West Virginia) and Parkes (70 m swinging antenna in Australia).

Exercise to the reader: guess the winner!

A few hints:

• All of them are in quite - radio quiet location
• Two of them points towards the galactic center (more pulsars) one towards the galactic anticenter
• Two of them can follow sources one of them cannot
• One of them is run by the same people who run the ATNF Radio Pulsar catalogue.

Twitter

You can follow us live on Twitter: #CSTAR11

Introducing Nicola Bassan

Hello world!

I'm Nicola Bassan, currently a 3rd year PHD student in SISSA (astrophysics sector).

I'm hoping to give you at least a flavour of what is going here in the volcanic Catania.

Stay tuned!

Introducing: Daniele Viganò

Hi people!
I'm Daniele Viganò, I will contribute to this Compstar blog together with other guys. I have just finished the first year of PhD in University of Alicante, studying the magnetosphere of magnetars. Of course, I love Sicily and its food!
Stay tuned

New Bloggers

Welcome to our new intrepid bloggers Lucy Keer and Nicola Bassan! Lucy and Nicola will be offering inside views of what is going on at the COMPSTAR meeting, goings on about town in Catania, and what is overheard in the hallways of INFN.

Anna Watts: X-ray and Gamma Ray properties of Neutron Stars

Anna Watts is covering these topics today -- lots to cover! I'm looking forward to hearing about the proposed X-ray timing experiment LOFT, its sensitivities, and its expected scientific capabilities.

Welcome!

This is the first post to the COMPSTAR 2011 blog, following the COMPSTAR 2011 summer school in Catania, Sicily, from May 3-May 13 2011. Welcome!