Rationale
The "V VISCACHA meeting" is the fifth annual international scientific meeting of the VISCACHA collaboration. It is a space where scientific results are presented, new ideas are discussed, and projects are developed.
The past four editions of the Meeting ocurred in a format reserved only for VISCACHA members. This year, we want to open the doors and extend our invitation to the general academic public, hence the name "V VISCACHA and Friends meeting". This edition is also be special since it will be our first meeting held in Chile. We hope that, in this way, the V VISCACHA Meeting will boost our collaboration in the country.
The idea for these changes came after the tremendous success of our first VISCACHA mini-workshop that took place in a dedicated afternoon session during the XVIII SOCHIAS annual meeting, where numerous participants from outside the VISCACHA collaboration were interested to join (see photo below).
What is VISCACHA ?
The VISCACHA survey is an ongoing scientific project aimed at studying star clusters in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC), two dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, where we live. Among the many open questions that VISCACHA contributes to answer are: "How did the interactions between the LMC and SMC happen?", "Why are the populations of star clusters different in the Milky Way and in the Magellanic Clouds?", "How to explain the chemical evolution of LMC and SMC?", "Why does LMC only have clusters older than 10Gyr and younger than 4Gyr?".
The images of the clusters are collected using the adaptive optics module (SAMI) of the SOAR telescope (Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope), located in Chile, owned by a consortium, whose majority partner is Brazil with 30% of rights, in addition to the 10% of Chilean time, that the collaboration has access.
VISCACHA is the project with the longest accumulated SOAR time (>500 hours) and we have already observed more than 250 star clusters on the outskirts of the LMC and SMC. Thus, there is a great responsibility to make good use of the data already collected, which the VISCACHA team has been doing in an organized way, with regular virtual meetings, supervision of master's and doctoral theses, publication of scientific articles, with more than 40 members and a dozen papers so far.
What topics will be covered?
The V VISCACHA Meeeting will take a whole week in Universidad de La Serena, Chile. The first half of the event will be open to the general public, with invited and contributed talks from VISCACHA members and other scientist, covering topics such as:
- Chemical evolution of the Magellanic Clouds
- Structure and dynamics of the Magellanic Clouds
- Stellar and star cluster evolution
The final two days will be dedicated to hand-on sections, reserved for members of the collaboration. As the previous Meetings proved, these are a great opportunity for the VISCACHA team to work togheter in person.
We have also organized a visit to Cerro Pachón, where the SOAR telescope is situated, on Wednesday, separating the two sections, and a closing "Star party" on Friday night. We invite everyone to join us in these events! (Don't forget to register, if you want to participate, more details in the Social tab)
Poster
