The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna are leading an international study on dark galaxies. ULL PhD student Guacimara García Bethencourt, together with her thesis supervisors Arianna Di Cintio and Sébastien Comerón, both lecturers in the Department of Astrophysics at the ULL and researchers at the IAC, presents a pioneering study in Astronomy & Astrophysics on one of the most intriguing objects in modern astrophysics: dark galaxies, systems rich in gas and dark matter but incapable of forming stars, and therefore invisible to traditional telescopes

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