Prof. Dr. Juan José Salazar González, Universidad de La Laguna - Tenerife (Spain)
Chair: Prof. Carlo Filippi, University of Brescia
When: Thursday, June 13th, 2024, 11:30 AM
Where: Sala della Biblioteca, San Faustino Building
Is there other intelligent life in the Universe? Are there other planets where humans could live? Scientists are constantly observing the sky looking for answers to these and other questions. Using spectroscopy, they have detected more than 4000 planets so far, and there are many areas of the sky still waiting to be explored. In our talk, we will describe a new optimization problem arising in the management of a sophisticated tool in a modern telescope. It is a multi-object spectrometer with a configurable slit unit. The field of view of the spectrograph is divided into contiguous and parallel spatial bands, each one associated with two opposite sliding metal bars that can be positioned to observe one astronomical object. Thus several objects can be analyzed simultaneously within a configuration of the bars called a mask. Due to the high demand from astronomers, pointing the spectrograph’s field of view to the sky, rotating it, and selecting the objects to conform a mask is a crucial optimization problem for the efficient use of the spectrometer. The talk describes this problem, presents a Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation for the case where the rotation angle is fixed, presents a non-convex formulation for the case where the rotation angle is unfixed, describes a heuristic approach for the general problem, and discusses computational results on real-world and randomly-generated instances