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 astronomers, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has observed a dramatic change in a supermassive black hole. Located about 10 billion light-years away, the object dimmed to roughly one-twentieth of its former brightness in just two decades — an extraordinarily short interval on cosmic timescales. The discovery was made within a collaborative observing framework linking Japan’s Subaru Telescope with the GTC in Spain’s Canary Islands at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in La Palma