During October, the Adaptive Optics System team at the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTCAO) of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the technical team at the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan), successfully completed the integration of the GRANCAIN instrument into the world's largest optical-infrared telescope. The installation was carried out at the GTCAO outlet on the telescope's Nasmyth B platform, a key step in initiating performance testing of the new adaptive optics system. This is the first scientific instrument to operate using the GTC's adaptive

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

On 18 September 2026, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU) received a communication from the Executive Director of the TMT International Observatory (TIO) stating that its partners had been unable to reach the consensus required to accept the financial offer presented by the Ministry on 29 July to begin construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) on the island of La Palma. The proposal envisaged financing of up to €1 billion: a contribution from the Centre for the