Astronomers have used telescopes around the world, includingthe Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, to study the asteroid 1998 KY26, revealing it to be almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. The asteroid is the 2031 target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 extended mission. The new observations offer key information for the mission’s operations at the asteroid. “We found that the reality of the object is completely different from what it was previously described as,” says astronomer Toni Santana-Ros, a

From 13 to 17 April 2026, the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) hosted the ExGal-Twin 2nd Radio Astronomy School and 2nd Project Meeting, key activities of the European project ExGal-Twin, coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The event brought together researchers, students and technical staff from the IAC and the partner institutions: the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute (University of Groningen), the Institute for Computational Cosmology (Durham University), and the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg (CNRS), reinforcing scientific collaboration and

An international team of researchers, including researchers from the IAC, have studied in detail a remarkable couple of dwarf galaxies “dancing with each other” inside an unpopulated area of the Universe. This uncommon pair of low-mass galaxies merging “in the middle of nowhere”, near the center of a cosmic void, offers a unique view of one-on-one interactions and of the evolution of galaxies located in very low density environments. Researchers from the Calar Alto Void Integral-field Treasury surveY (CAVITY) project, led by the University of Granada, have discovered a rare and ongoing