On 10 and 11 June, the IACTEC facilities – the technology transfer and business collaboration hub of the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics (IAC) – will host the meeting of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Science Programme Committee (SPC), the body responsible for deciding how funds allocated to ESA’s science programme should be managed and for what purposes. The meeting in Tenerife brings together representatives from the 23 ESA member states and specialists involved in the planning, selection and monitoring of the scientific projects that will shape European space science in the

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

An international team, with participation from the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have, for the first time, captured a detailed snapshot of planetary systems in an era long shrouded in mystery. The study, called ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) , is based on a series of 10 articles published simultaneously in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics and was carried out using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) . Thanks to this work, the sharpest images ever of 24 debris disks, the dusty belts left