Fascinated by science It seems to be a common misconception that astronomers are all elderly bods who spend all night and every night lying back in a comfy chair gazing through a telescope, so the meeting with top island astronomer Miguel Serra Ricart came as something of a pleasant surprise.

Miguel Serra Ricart, director of the Teide observation complex at Izaña © Island Connections Tenerife Guía de Isora House/Chalet to sell Chalet in Los Gigantes Big house in Los Gigantes wit garden and swimming pool. Separate apartment of 78 m2 and a studio of 40 ... more details by Sheila Collis - 21.10.2004 - He’s incredibly young for someone who has reached the top levels of his profession as director of the Teide observatories, in one of the three top areas for astronomy worldwide, and we met during daylight in the Canarian Astrophysics Institute’s (IAC) offices in La Laguna. “With two or three nights of observation you’ve got enough data for a whole year. The computer compiles everything, then you come down here and analyse it. These days no astronomer spends every night in observation – at the most it will be one or two weeks a year.” Bang goes another myth! Miguel is from Barcelona and came to Tenerife for four years on a grant in 1989 to do his thesis, “But now I’m staying. I’ve been here 15 years!” He was sure of his destiny from an early age. “I was and am fascinated by science. With all due respects, when I look at a work of art, I don’t understand it, but when my teacher came along and demonstrated something to me with a formula, I thought yes, now I understand. The good thing for me about science is that it has a language, mathematics, which is used to interpret nature in a very concrete manner and from being very young I was passionate about it especially physics, being able to understand the ‘why’ of what happened around me. Then one day when I was about 14 or 15 years old, I looked up into a starry sky and I thought ‘this is huge this is really interesting to study’ and I decided I wanted to understand more about the universe.”  It’s not exactly a run of the mill choice for a career and I was curious to know how Miguel’s family had reacted. “I’m from a neighbourhood of Barcelona called San Andreu and my parents are small businessmen in the clothing industry. Of four children, I’m the only university graduate and my parents didn’t understand – they didn’t see any future in it. When I told my father that I wanted to be a physicist, he said, “that won’t put bread on the table”, he thought that by the time I’d finished studying I’d have got it out of my system, but it didn’t happen like that. When I managed to obtain the grant to do my thesis here, my father said ‘how much are they going to pay you in the Canaries’ and in those days it wasn’t very much and he said ‘if you stay here with me, I’ll pay you double.’ – I told him that my objective wasn’t the money and he said ‘nonsense, you’ll be back’. But their attitude was normal I think, bearing in mind the kind of education they received, they were children of the post civil war period and saw economic factors as more important than investigation and despite the fact that they didn’t understand, they let me study what I wanted and paid for my studies and I know my mother is very proud of where I am and what I’ve achieved and I think my father is too – deep down. I believe the important thing in life is not what you do, it’s that you feel good about what you do. I’m very happy, I’ve got loads of projects, I can’t ask for more from life. I think I radiate that happiness and my parents see that and are content.” So, what makes the Canaries so special for astronomers? “Today there are three important places in the world for observation, in the Northern hemisphere Hawaii and the Canaries and in the Southern hemisphere the Atacama Desert in Chile. Some astronomers claim that a good observatory would be on a column 2,000 metres high in the middle of the sea, high up where there are no clouds and less atmosphere to absorb the infra red rays so that we could see faint emissions and in the middle of the sea because there would be less distortion to the picture due to air turbulences around other peaks. The most similar to that column are the volcanic islands and that’s why Hawaii and the Canaries are so great. Atacama is very similar because from the coast it’s at sea level then goes up sharply to the Andes. Obviously the best place would be in space, but that’s not possible yet, but I see it as necessary in the future. At the moment it’s very expensive, but it will happen, we’ll have better and more efficient sources of energy which will make it easier for us to go into outer space”. And when it does happen he’d love to go, “to be able to observe everything from up there is everyone’s dream. It would be fantastic”. The big observatory telescopes worldwide are around ten metres in diameter. In Hawai they have two 10 metres diameter telescopes whilst in Chile there are four eight metre telescopes. The Grantecan telescope under construction in El Roque de los Muchachos is also ten metres and should see its ‘first light’ (the term given to its first use) at the end of next year. Talks are also underway for agreements to allow the installation of two large American telescopes and the construction of what Canarian president Adán Martín called a “super giant” telescope in La Palma which it is claimed would make the IAC world leaders in astrophysics. La Palma was chosen over Tenerife because although they both benefit from the Ley del Cielo (the sky law) to control light pollution, in La Palma there is less of a problem because they were able to change all the installations which was impossible in Tenerife, so you can see the stars much clearer. In the course of his work Miguel has had to travel a great deal and has spent quite a lot of time in the various observatories in Atacama, although he hasn’t yet got to Hawaii. One of the biggest projects he’s involved in is, “to journey all over the world to investigate and record great space occurrences such as total eclipses of the sun and the moon, star showers and the spectacular aurora borealis. In 1998 I created an association called Shelios and I travel to remote places to observe things. We’ve been to sites in Turkey, Greenland, Patagonia, Australia and we’re going to Namibia soon.” Following the discovery of the new planets Quoar and Sedna, I asked Miguel if we could expect any more. “There are two streams of thought, one that they are planets and the other that it is a marketing manoeuvre. I would call them sleeping comets. There is a great populated sphere called the Oort Cloud and they are going to discover a lot more of these comets. This type of discovery is important, but there’s no cause to call them planets, however if that makes people talk about them well, that’s welcomed.” So what’s the difference? “Even we haven’t got a clearly marked description, although it’s certain that the planets share certain characteristics, stable orbit, tend to have moons, tend to have atmosphere or be gaseous.”  He has not yet visited NASA, but is involved with ESA, the European Space Agency as he is, “responsible for an interesting project to locate and follow space leftovers, dead satellites for example that have broken up leaving a load of screws and bits of metal floating around. One of our telescopes follows them and catalogues them, how many and where, until they enter into the atmosphere and burn up. They could cause damage to space missions, existing satellites and the international space station so we keep an eye on them.” As head of the Teide observatories Miguel tends to spend more time now on sharing his knowledge with others than actual investigation. Apart from the pre and post graduates at the university there is the Canary Island Winter School of Astrophysics for people who are doing their thesis involving experts from all over the world and 50 – 60 students. He’s also edited various books, videos and posters for teachers, attends conferences and once a year for the last five year has conducted a series of talks in the Pirámides of Güimar. “It’s very well received, this year we had 250 people. I explain what a solstice is and then in the evening I explain the constellations and we use a telescope. It’s great, and I believe that people learn things, which is more or less what my objective has been in the last few years. “We have to educate our society from the scientific point of view. Our society is very uneducated scientifically speaking. People read a novel and more or less dominate the arts, but very few people know for example that at the moment there is a spaceship that is called Cassini that is in Saturn which is going to study Titan and that it could be fundamental because there might have been organic life there. It seems that science is still not news at a social level. “The big question for which humanity has no answer is ‘if there is organic life outside the earth’. The answer to the question of is there intelligent life in space still has to be no, because we’ve got no proof. To the question is there organic life the answer is still no, but to have organic life we need we need water or organic molecules and that has now been seen. In Mars and in our galaxy there is a lot of water and we’ve found a lot of organic molecules, carbon and oxygen in our galaxy. Now we’ve got to detect an organism, and within the candidates within our solar system with the most possibilities to house primitive forms of life is Mars, which we now know has water at both poles and possibly in the subsoil and it is very probable that there are primitive forms or life, amoebas or fossils. Then there are two other candidates which are very interesting, two satellites of Jupiter and Saturn - in Jupiter - Europe which we know has an ice crust and we believe that the subsoil may contain water and therefore organisms and Titan in Saturn, which is a moon similar to Europe. Recent images from Cassini show that there is methane and one of the possibilities is, that it has been produced by the putrefaction of organic matter. Cassini is going to send a space probe called Huygens to impact with the surface of Titan as deeply as possible and to continue sending information as long as it can. One of the longstanding paradoxes is whether or not space exploration can be justified in the face of so much poverty on earth. “I think that’s an easy thing to say, an easy comparison and things aren’t so simple. To invest money in feeding the poor may not be the best way to help them long-term, it’s only a short-term solution. These types of projects favour technological development. Apollo meant a huge technological advance, for example in plastics, inventions and methods of management which if used correctly could be of far more long-term use in the third world. It’s better to give them the technology to make the most of their own resources, not to sell them or give them resources from outside which will only make them more dependent.” Over the years there have been many claims of alien sightings in the islands, I asked Miguel his opinion of whether or not there was intelligent life outside the earth. Smiling he replied, “Where I’m not sure if there is intelligent life is on our planet. As I have said, as a scientist I have to say there is no other intelligent life, because there is no proof yet, but my feeling is that there clearly has to be. The universe is very big and although the conditions under which life is produced are very complicated, our universe is so big that simple probability says there has to be intelligent life somewhere else.” However he is somewhat sceptical about the reported sightings, or that the aliens had come to the Canaries for their holidays. “The visionaries we’ll leave to Nostradamus. It’s one thing to believe it’s possible and totally another that these beings visit us. If life exists it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve got to visit us, but what’s more, even if they did, to think that beings capable of travelling through the universe and therefore possessing a superb technology would be so stupid as to let themselves be seen by undeveloped beings is ridiculous. They won’t contact us. We’re still primitive, we still kill each other, and we judge everyone by our standards. Beings who can travel through space with that level of technology have to be ethically perfect or they would have destroyed themselves, and those ethics will not allow them to interfere with beings who are still developing. It may be true that they’re observing us, but not that they’ve allowed themselves to be seen by Pepe on his night shift for example. Imagine if a super developed being arrived and they presented it to someone like Bush. The first thing he’d do is to get out the aircraft carriers and the missiles to blow up the space ship, because of course, ‘they’re coming to destroy us’. Humanity hasn’t yet got the capacity to assimilate contact”. For those astronomy enthusiasts belonging to a club, who can obtain some kind of confirmation from their club president, there is a telescope set apart in Teide for their use. Izaña observatory centre is also open for visits by previous appointment every Wednesday and Friday (922 605 200). However as Miguel says, “It’s not a theme park, it’s a working area, but for people who are really interested in astronomy, they can learn new things.” I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to the IAC and the chat with Miguel. His intelligence and enthusiasm is enchanting and he has the rare gift of making a difficult topic very easy to understand and imparting his enthusiasm to others. His advice would be for everybody to, “go up one moonless night into the Valle de Ucanca (Las Cañadas del Teide) and really feel the loveliness of the night sky. It’s a beautiful spectacle and very different to what you can see in the rest of Europe.”

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