The robotic Transient Survey Telescope (TST) installed in the Teide Observatory of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has successfully started its scientific observations. It is a 1 metre telescope which permits the detection of rapidly varying objects, and is set up to map the sky. The TST has been built and run via a public-private collaboration with Canary funding. The Transient Survey Telescope (TST) is a telescope with a 1 metre primary mirror, built to take long-term observations called surveys, for the detection of faint, rapidly varying objects over a wide area of the sky

Research led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has used an innovative technique based on artificial intelligence to study how stars form in galaxies. By analysing 10 000 nearby galaxies, the team have discovered that most stars are born within their own galaxy. Galactic mergers, while important, are not the main source of new stars. Furthermore, the study reveals that more massive galaxies are more affected by these mergers. These results, published in Nature Astronomy, provide new clues about the complex history of galaxies and their evolution over time. Most galaxies do not

An international research team, led from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) together with a group of Italian universities, has confirmed a new method for finding protoclusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the early universe. These progenitors of present-day clusters of galaxies played an essential role in the evolution of the universe, but are not easy to find. This study shows that a specific type of galaxies, those which emit radiation at submillimetre wavelengths, are very good indicators of the presence of distant protoclusters