Massive stars in metal-poor galaxies often have close partners, just like the massive stars in our metal-rich Milky Way. This has been discovered by an international scientific team in which research staff from the Instituto de Aastrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) participate. They used the European Very Large Telescope in Chile to monitor the velocity of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The research is published in Nature Astronomy . For the past twenty years, astronomers have known that many massive stars in the metal-rich Milky Way have a

A global team of astronomers and machine learning researchers today announced the release of the " Multimodal Universe" - a groundbreaking 100 terabyte dataset that brings together hundreds of millions of astronomical observations in unprecedented detail and scale. This massive collection of space data aims to revolutionize how artificial intelligence can be applied to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. " The Multimodal Universe makes accessing machine learning-ready astronomical datasets as easy as writing a single line of code," says Helen Qu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Flatiron

This Saturday, 29 March 2025, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) was able to follow the partial solar eclipse from the Teide Observatory in Tenerife. Although subtle to the naked eye, this eclipse was used by the IAC's outreach team to raise awareness of the phenomenon among a group of people from the ‘Friends of the IAC’ programme and IAC staff. At the same time, an observation was also made from the IAC Headquarters in La Laguna, which could be seen live on the centre's YouTube channel. The eclipse began at 09:14 UT and ended at 10:56 UT, with its maximum at 10:03 UT. For just