Research carried out with the new WEAVE spectrograph, installed on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), and in whose construction the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has participated, has found a mysterious bar-shaped cloud of iron inside the iconic Ring Nebula. The study was conducted by a European team led by astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Cardiff University, and includes researchers from the IAC. The cloud of iron atoms, described for the first time in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has been awarded a new ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for the MELODY project, led by researcher Savita Mathur. This grant, one of the most prestigious and competitive in European science, supports established researchers with outstanding track records and highly innovative proposals, with the aim of promoting frontier research capable of opening up new avenues of knowledge. MELODY’s main objective is to study the rotation and magnetic activity of Sun-like stars in order to understand in greater detail the physical
The exhibition, opened at the Museo de las Ciencias de Castilla-La Mancha, brings the search for Earth-like planets closer to the public and displays technological components developed by Spanish centres involved in the mission. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating in the temporary exhibition ‘In search of new Earths’, a display dedicated to the European space mission PLATO and to one of the major challenges in astrophysics today: the search for and characterisation of habitable Earth-like planets beyond the Solar System. The exhibition, which can be visited until