News

This section includes scientific and technological news from the IAC and its Observatories, as well as press releases on scientific and technological results, astronomical events, educational projects, outreach activities and institutional events.

  • Teide 1 en el cúmulo de las Pléyades
    It is 25 years, now, since the astrophysicists Rafael Rebolo, María Rosa Zapatero-Osorio and Eduardo Marín announced the discovery of the first confirmed brown dwarf, Teide 1. It is in the Pleiades star cluster, and it is named after the Teide Observatory, from where it was observed for the first time with the Spanish IAC-80 telescope. It is one of the scientific landmarks with the greatest international impact obtained by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.
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  • Poster of the third Spanish-American Writers’ Festival in La Palma
    The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) will be collaborating for the third successive year with the Spanish-American Writers’ Festival which will be celebrated from September 14th to 19th in Los Llanos de Aridane (La Palma). The programme of this third edition, in which almost 40 writers and a small group of meta-writers (editors, journalists and critics) will participate, will consist of 35 sessions. Among them we can pick out panel sessions on a variety of themes, autographs of examples by some of the authors involved, and activities aimed at the younger generation whose schools
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  • Artist’s conception of waves trapped between the surface of a sunspot (lower image, taken with the GREGOR Fabry-Perot Interferometer) and the transition region (upper image, by courtesy of NASA/SDO and the scientific team of AIA). Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    An international team of researchers, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the existence of resonant cavities above sunspots. These results, recently published in two articles in the journals Nature Astronomy and The Astrophysical Journal Letters, have settled a debate lasting several decades about the nature of the waves in the active regions of the Sun. Sunspots are darker regions which often appear on the Sun’s surface. They are caused by strong concentrations of magnetic field, and can be as big as the Earth, or even much bigger. From the end of the 1960’s
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  • Luminosity - X-ray colour diagram of the black hole MAXI J1820+070 (black, solid line). The different traces indicate wind detections at different wavelengths throughout the entire outburst.
    X-ray binaries are stellar systems composed of a compact object (either a stellar-mass black hole or a neutron star) and a donor star that transfers mass to the former. Outflows represent fundamental physical phenomena to understand accretion processes in these systems. Black holes show three types of outflows: radio-jets and optical winds during the hard accretion states, and highly ionised winds observed in X-rays during the soft states. The black hole transient MAXI J1820+070 showed optical winds with velocities up to 1800 km/s during the hard state of its 2018-2019 outburst. In this work
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  • The proyect moved around a part of the zone of Allande, and visited the villages of Berducedo, Monón, Fonteta, and Pola de Allande. Credit: Raquel González Cuesta.
    The Allande Stars project, funded and supported by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), is bringing Astronomy to more than 300 people to the zone of Allande, in Asturias, under the strictest safety measures, and in a spirit of unity under the same sky. Last weekend saw the activities in the Allande Stars project ( www.allandestars.com ), an initiative in itinerant science outreach whose aim is to bring Science and in particular Astronomy closer to the rural villages in the south west of Asturias, who in general have less access to museums, cultural lectures, and other similar
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