Towards the end of their lives some 95% of stars evolve into red giants which lose their mass via a “stellar wind”. Eventually they end up as planetary nebulae, ionized gas with a central hot star, a white dwarf. Here we report ALMA data on massive red giant (asymptotic giant branch, AGB) stars, displaying a spiral structure which show that these stars are not individual and have a binary companion. This offers an alternative explanation to the high rates of mass loss which it was thought were present towards the end of the lives of the most massive AGB stars. We show that these stars lose

A delegation from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOCC) have visited the Headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, and the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma).

Last week, the founder of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, one of whose telescopes is at the Teide Observatory (Tenerife), paid a visit to the Headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, and to the Canary Island Observatories, on the heights of Tenerife and La Palma.

Con motivo de la celebración del Día de Europa, el Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) se suma al reto #Ode2Joy, que promueve la organización Europa Nostra, con el vídeo “Oda astrofísica”, en el que ha participado personal de este centro de investigación.

The Catholic University of Louvain, in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna, leads the first Asteroseismological study of high mass stars, using NASA telescopes.

The OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) has discovered, on the spiral galaxy Messier 106, a system of globular clusters whose unusual distribution and motion, wich could be a relic from the the “cosmic noon”.