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.

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  • Magnetar surrounded by the nebula responsible for the radio emission associated with some FRBs
    Press release
    Grantecan helps solve the mystery behind some of the Universe's most powerful radio bursts
    A new international study, using observations from the Gran Telescopio Canarias at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, has identified a plasma bubble as the source of the persistent emission observed in some of the so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs), one of the most powerful and unknown cosmic events in the Universe. The data also allow researchers to constrain the nature of the “engine” powering these mysterious sources. The results are published today in Nature. Discovered just over a decade ago, fast radio bursts (FRBs) emit millisecond-long pulses that release an immense
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  • Selection of galaxy images taken by Euclid
    Press release
    "Galaxy Zoo: Euclid" seeks help in classifying galaxies
    A new citizen science project launched today by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Euclid Consortium, in collaboration with the Zooniverse platform, will enable volunteers from around the world to identify the shapes of millions of galaxies in images taken by ESA's Euclid space telescope. The aim of the initiative is to train deep AI neural networks to build the largest morphology catalogue to date. In November 2023 and May 2024, the world got its first glimpse at the quality of Euclid’s images, targeting a variety of sources, from nearby nebulas to distant clusters of galaxies. And
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  • log_n_c_n_o_bsgs_ann_groups7
    Research news
    The origin of the brightest stars in any Galaxy lies in stellar mergers
    Massive stars, those over ten times heavier than our Sun, are the conduits of most elements of the periodic table and drive the morphological and chemical makeup of their host galaxies. Yet the origin of the most luminous and hottest stars among them, called 'blue supergiants', has been debated for many decades. Blue supergiants are strange stars. First, they are observed in large numbers, despite conventional stellar physics expecting them to live only briefly. Second, they are typically found alone, despite most massive stars being born with companions. Third, the majority of them harbour
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  • Artist's impression of a binary star system
    Press release
    Study reveals how binary stars change their stellar dance with age
    Research led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered that, in binary systems, stars that evolve into red giants change the way they rotate with their companions, making their orbits more circular. The result was achieved after studying nearly 1000 solar-like oscillating stars in binary systems, the greatest yield to date of such objects. For their identification, the third Gaia Data Release (Gaia-DR3) and NASA Kepler and TESS catalogs have been explored. The study has been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics and has been selected as the most recent
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  • TST en el Observatorio del Teide
    Press release
    The new TST telescope at the Teide Observatory celebrates its First Light
    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
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  • Webb's first deep field
    Press release
    A study suggests that there are galaxies which might be older than the currently accepted age of the universe
    An observationally based study, led by Martín López Corredoira, researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has found that certain very distant massive galaxies appear to be older than the limit set by standard cosmology. The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, is based on the analysis of data recently obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies that existed when the universe was only between 4% and 5% of its present age, according to the accepted standard model of cosmology. The researchers infer that the mean age of some of these galaxies would not be
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