Published on: Tuesday, 22 June 2010

CIT is hosting the summer VERITAS Collaboration Conference from the 28th June - 1st July.

The VERITAS collaboration is involved in the field of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy and is comprised of more than 90 scientists from 20 different institutions in the United States, Canada, Germany, England and Ireland.

VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) consists of four 12m telescopes and is based at the Smithsonian Institution’s Whipple observatory in southern Arizona. These telescopes detect Very High Energy gamma rays which are generated by the most violent physical processes in the Universe. This is the most sensitive such detector in the world and in the last 12 months has made some groundbreaking discoveries leading to in excess of 20 publications in the scientific literature, one of the most recent being in the prestigious journal Nature.

The purpose of the conference is to review the most recent discoveries, to plan the observation programme for the next year and to discuss the implementation of an upgrade to the instrument to keep it at the forefront of ground-based gamma ray astronomy research.

Dr Josh Reynolds of the Department of Applied Physics and Instrumentation and the Optical and Instrumentation Group at Blackrock Castle Observatory is an active member of the VERITAS collaboration and is responsible for organising this year’s collaboration conference in Cork. Anybody requiring further information may contact him directly by E: josh.reynolds@cit.ie.