RedCLARA (Latin America)

The skies of Latin America have captivated stargazers for centuries. Today, the landscape is dotted with many of the world’s most advanced and important regional, national and international observatories, providing forefront access to the heavens and beyond – enabling groundbreaking research to advance our knowledge of the universe.

The Amazon is the largest and best-known center of biodiversity on the planet, but its forests are being lost at unsustainably high rates. Ongoing research in the Ecuadorian Amazon since the mid-1990s has resulted in concrete environmental benefits for the region and is now supported by a new connection between Ecuador and the United States.

A group of 50 Brazilian researchers shall partake in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, deemed as revolutionary for Astronomy. Totaling R$ 1 billion in investments, the Telescope will be able to map almost half of the sky in six filters for a period of ten years and its deluge of data will be a huge challenge for information technology.

Latin America plays a vital role in the worldwide computing grid essential for processing the massive amounts of data generated from particle smashing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that reveal information about the origins of the Universe.

When the Latin American Observatory of Extraordinary Events announced in October 2011 that rainfall was expected to be above average for the South American Northwest and above average for the Southeast of the same region, an early alert for floods was issued for Panama, Colombia and Venezuela, and one of a drought for North-western Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. This is an example of how the information gathered and disseminated by the Observatory, a collaboration involving a number of institutions, helps Latin American nations with risk management for extreme environmental events.

Thanks to the Mylims platform, scientists around the world are able to process and manipulate data, interpret results and compare them with spectra obtained by other users and those stored in databases, thus accelerating the understanding of compounds. Mylims has already led to breakthroughs in the diagnosis of illnesses, such as leukaemia, and has become a valuable tool for food chemists to detect fraudulent coffee.

Launched in April 2015, the first Chilean Virtual Observatory (ChiVO) is an astro-informatic platform for the administration and analysis of massive data coming from the observatories built across the country. Its implementation will provide advanced computing tools and research algorithms to the Chilean astronomical community.