From a single bright star in the constellation of Indus, an international team of scientists led by the University of Birmingham, with the participation of scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has revealed new insights about an ancient collision between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and another smaller galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus, early in its history. Nature Astronomy publishes these results today. This team adopted the novel approach of applying the forensic characterisation of a single ancient, bright star called ν Indi, visible from the southern hemisphere, as a

This morning, in the Cultural Space of the CajaCanarias Foundation in Santa Cruz de La Palma there was a public presentation of the Report on the Socio-economic impact of the Thirty Metre Telescope on the Island, by the Professor of the Department of Economy, Accountancy, and Finance of the University of La Laguna, its author. The report shows that the installation of the TMT on La Palma would not only be a milestone in the development of astrophysics, but it would have a significant positive economic impact on the Island. As well as Juan José Díaz, the others who spoke before the

This astronomical event will be broadcast live via the channel sky-live.tv in the early hours of January 4th, with the collaboration of the European project EELabs. Together with the Geminids and the Perseids, this is the most intense meteor shower of the year. The three most spectacular meteor showers of the year are the Perseids (in August) the Geminids (in December) and the Quadrantids in the first week of January. Although the Perseids are the best known, the maximum is in a holiday period with mild night-time temperatures, the Geminids and the Quadrantids never let us down, with an

Radioastronomy is one of the branches of observational astrophysics which has experienced considerable growth in recent years. To study the universe at radio frequencies specific instruments: radiotelescopes, are designed. Among the most powerful is the ALMA telescope array in the Atacama Desert (Chile) and in the near future we will see the building of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia and South Africa. Raffaella Morganti, a Senior Astronomer at ASTRON and Professor of Astronomy at the Kapteyn Institute of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has worked on these and

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the Museum of Science and the Cosmos (MCC) of Museums of Tenerife, and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) has published, as it does every year, a calendar with important astronomical dates for the year 2020, in the format of a poster or a wall calendar (see the gallery). The picture which illustrates it is a photograph of the GTC at dawn, in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), taken by the astrophotographer Daniél López. Free copies of the calendar, on paper in poster format can be obtained from

This telescope was launched this morning from the Kourou (French Guyana) base of the European Space Agency (ESA) to observe minute changes in the brightness of stars, and to analyze the density and the composition of the exoplanets in orbit around them. In this project, led by ESA and Switzerland, there are 21 scientific institutions from ten countries participating, among them two researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC). The aim of the Cheops telescope is to follow exoplanets already discovered to make precision analyses of their densities, which is an essential step