A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics unveils a powerful way to determine the size of dark matter haloes—the massive, invisible structures that host galaxies—by simply measuring how large galaxies appear in deep astronomical images. Researchers Ignacio Trujillo and Claudio Dalla Vecchia, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), demonstrate that galaxy size can serve as a precise proxy for halo size, offering measurements up to six times more accurate than previous methods. Using the cutting-edge EAGLE cosmological simulations

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), has confirmed the existence of three bodies orbiting the dynamic exoplanetary system TOI-201. They include a super-earth (TOI-201 d), a warm Jupiter (TOI-201 b) and a brown dwarf (TOI-201 c). The paper is published in Science Advances. “The goal was to characterize the TOI-201 planetary system to understand not just what planets are there, but how they interact with each other dynamically,” said Ismael Mireles, a PhD candidate in the UNM Department of Physics and Astronomy and

An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), has unveiled a breakthrough explanation for the origin of tiny, jet-like plasma ejections in the solar atmosphere, known as “nanojets.” These elusive events which are recently discovered by the NASA’s solar telescopes are thought to play an important role in heating and sustaining the solar corona at temperatures above one million Kelvin. Why Study Nanojets? For decades, solar physicists have been puzzled by the so-called “coronal heating problem.” While the Sun