The GRAVITY+ Project: Towards All-sky, Faint-Science, High-Contrast Near-Infrared Interferometry at the VLTI

The GRAVITY instrument has been revolutionary for near-infrared interferometry by pushing sensitivity and precision to previously unknown limits. With the upgrade of GRAVITY and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in GRAVITY+, these limits will be pushed even further, with vastly improved sky coverage, as well as faint-science and high-contrast capabilities. This upgrade includes the implementation of wide-field off-axis fringe-tracking, new adaptive optics systems on all Unit Telescopes, and laser guide stars in an upgraded facility. GRAVITY+ will open up the sky to the measurement of black hole masses across cosmic time in hundreds of active galactic nuclei, use the faint stars in the Galactic centre to probe General Relativity, and enable the characterisation of dozens of young exoplanets to study their formation, bearing the promise of another scientific revolution to come at the VLTI.Comment: Published in the ESO Messenge

The RE-Europe data set

This data set models the continental European electricity system, including demand and renewable energy inflows for the period 2012-2014. The main features of the data set are: High resolution (~50km, 1 hour) and large extent (Mainland Europe, 3 years) Technical & economic characteristics of generators from real-world data and best available estimates Synthetic wind and solar observations and forecasts from numerical weather prediction models, describing the full spatio-temporal structure of potential wind and solar production The transmission system comprises 1494 buses and 2156 lines, and is fitted based on [1]. The location, capacity and fuel type for 969 real-world generators are given based on the information in [2], and these are supplied with full cost specifications estimated based on fuel type [3]. For each bus, signals for load [4, 5], wind and solar production is given for each hour of the three years, with the wind and solar signals based on meteorological weather data from [6,7]. Further, at hour 00 and 12, forecasts for the solar and wind production are given for the following 91 hours, based on weather data from [6]. All spatially-distributed data is aggregated to the nodal domain by summation/averaging over the area closest to each node. Wind and solar signals and forecast are given as capacity factors, i.e. production relative to rated power. To use the renewable signals, a capacity layout must be specified, which assigns an installed solar and wind capacity to each node. We supply two sets of capacity layouts, both scaled so the mean yearly production of (solar, wind) is equal the mean yearly load across EU. The Uniform layout is scaled to make the capacity in each node proportional to the area aggregated by that node - i.e. capacity is distributed uniformly across EU. The Proportional layout is scaled to make the capacity in each node proportional to the area aggregated by that node times the mean yearly capacity factor of the resource at that node - i.e. capacity is installed preferentially in nodes with high capacity factors. The data is intended for use in, e.g: Operational studies on markets Investment studies (generation capacity and transmission) Evaluation of future energy scenarios The source code used to generate this data is available at [9]. Version History: V1.2: Line information extended with data on the number of parallel lines in each connection. Fixed generator capacity typos. V1.1: License relaxed to CC-BY V1.0: Initial Releas