The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has initiated a project of science outreach in the Tenerife-II prison in El Rosario, with the aim of bringing knowledge about the Universe to the prisoners, as well as to the educational and other working personnel at that centre. This initiative is taken in the framework of the commitment of the IAC to the popularization of science as a tool for inclusión and social transformation. The project is led by the astrophysicist, and IAC researcher David Aguado and is a continuation of a first experiment in 2024 in the Madrid V prison at Soto del Real

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, among the tiniest and faintest galaxies known, may hold the key to understanding one of the Universe’s biggest mysteries: the true nature of dark matter. A new study reveals that even a single collision between dark matter particles every 10 billion years — roughly the age of the Universe — is enough to explain the dark matter cores observed in these small systems. These galaxies, which contain only a few thousand stars, are dominated by dark matter and have relatively simple evolutionary histories. That makes them ideal cosmic laboratories for testing theories

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