The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) announces the death of its founding director, Professor Francisco Sánchez Martínez, whose determination led to the creation of one of Europe's leading research centres and two of the world's finest astrophysical observatories: the Teide Observatory in Tenerife and the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma. He passed away today in Madrid, where he had been living for the last few years, at the age of 89. The director of the IAC, Valentín Martínez Pillet, emphasises that "Professor Sánchez's legacy is incalculable. He was a man who paved

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

How large can a galaxy grow? This is the question behind a new study led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in which an international team of astronomers has measured, with unprecedented precision, the size of IC 1101, considered the largest known galaxy in the Universe. The study has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The result confirms that this cosmic giant is even larger than previously thought. The main body of IC 1101 reaches a diameter of around 1.7 million light-years, approximately 10 times the size of the Milky Way. If it were placed between our galaxy and