An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the IAC, have performed a unique cosmic test - measuring the mass of an ancient star using two entirely different methods, finding agreement to within just 1.4%. This result marks a milestone in our ability to determine the ages of old stars and use them as living fossils to study the Milky Way’s distant past. The team analysed the red giant in the binary system KIC 10001167 using two independent approaches: firstly, by measuring the brightness and radial velocity variations due to the orbital motion of the binary, and secondly

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

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile, today released its first images of the universe, known in astronomy as an instrument's “first light”. This event marks the beginning of a project that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe over the next decade. Jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating, as part of a consortium of Spanish institutions, in its scientific exploitation and contributing observation time from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or