News

This section includes scientific and technological news from the IAC and its Observatories, as well as press releases on scientific and technological results, astronomical events, educational projects, outreach activities and institutional events.

  • Galactic composition of NGC 1291 in which its "peanut" structure is shown. Credit:  Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Jairo Méndez Abreu and Adriana de Lorenzo-Cáceres, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have discovered a peanut-shaped structure in the inner bar of a double-barred galaxy close to the Milky Way. Structures of this type, previously detected only in outer, or single, bars are useful tracers of the evolution of the galaxies.
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  • Image of asteroid Bennu created using eight images obtained on October 29, 2018 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a distance of 330 km. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona.
    After two years travelling through space, the NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has started to obtain images of the mission target, primitive asteroid Bennu. As part of the Scientific Team of this mission, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Javier Licandro and Julia de León have already started to work in the calibration of this images in preparation for the ones that will be obtained in December 2018 using color filters.
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  • This artist's rendering shows a disk of dust and planetary fragments around a star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. 
    The study, led by Paula Izquierdo, a doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has gone deeply into the analysis of this exceptional white dwarf, which shows periodic transits produced by fragments of a shredded planetesimal. The observations used for this research were obtained with the Gran Telescopio Canarias and with the Liverpool Telescope.
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  • Spectral energy distribution for the nucleus of NGC 1052. Different symbols represent the sub-arcsec and low-angular resolution measurements, interpolation, power-law, hot standard disc, and a Seyfert 2 template.
    Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs) are found in about 1/3 of all the galaxies in the Local Universe, establishing the most numerous class of AGNs. At low accretion rates, LLAGNs are expected to develop major changes in the structure of the accretion disc when compared to their bright counterparts, Seyfert galaxies and Quasars. Here we present high-angular resolution data (~13 pc) for the LLAGN in the nucleus of NGC 1052, covering 10 orders of magnitude in frequency from radio to X-rays. The flux distribution of the nucleus is well described by a broken power law plus an inverse
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  • Kepler's Supernova remnant. Crédito: X-ray: NASA/CXC/NCSU/M.Burkey et al; Optical: DSS. Release date: March 18, 2013.
    A study involving a researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), which has been led by a researcher at the Instituto de Física Fundamental (IFF-CSIC) and the Instituto de Ciencias del Cosmos (UB-IEEC), argues that the explosion that Johannes Kepler observed in 1604 was caused by a merger of two stellar residues.
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  • Image of the Sun from GONG telescopes network in Hα filter. Prominences are seen as dark filaments over the solar disk. The arrow indicates a prominence that oscillates. The diagram shows the horizontal velocity of the prominence. In the first phase of th
    An international team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) has cataloged around 200 oscillations of the solar prominences during the first half of 2014. Its development has been possible thanks to the GONG network of telescopes, of which one of them is located in the Teide Observatory.
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