An international team of astronomers has captured the most detailed and completed view yet of the mysterious filaments surrounding the giant galaxy M87. Using new observations from the Gran Telescopio Canarias and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the study reveals how these long, thread-like structures move, evolve, and interact with their galactic environment and the activity of the central supermassive black hole. These findings have just been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. M87: a giant galaxy and its mysterious threads M87, located about 55 million

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

A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics unveils a powerful way to determine the size of dark matter haloes—the massive, invisible structures that host galaxies—by simply measuring how large galaxies appear in deep astronomical images. Researchers Ignacio Trujillo and Claudio Dalla Vecchia, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), demonstrate that galaxy size can serve as a precise proxy for halo size, offering measurements up to six times more accurate than previous methods. Using the cutting-edge EAGLE cosmological simulations