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.

  • Correlation of 5-sigma between the number of Tidal Dwarf Galaxies around a parent spiral galaxy and the bulge index.
    Dark matter is a type of material which has not been observed through any telescope, but whose existence is deduced from its gravitational effects on visible matter. In 1974 the astronomer Vera Rubin measured the rotation curves of the stars in orbit around the centres of spiral galaxies and noticed that at distances greater than a certain radial distance from the nucleus the stars rotate at virtually constant velocity, independently of their distance from the  centre of rotation. However the estimates of the mass of the visible matter, the stars and the gas in the galaxy lead to predictions
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  • Composition of the earthshine, the light reflected from the Earth to the night-time face of the Moon, and the figure showing the monthly mean apparent albedo anomalies from December 1998 through December 2014. Anomalies were calculated over the mean of th
    The Earth’s albedo is a fundamental climate parameter for understanding the radiation budget of the atmosphere. It has been traditionally measured from space platforms, but also from the ground for sixteen years from Big Bear Solar Observatory by observing the Moon. The photometric ratio of the dark (earthshine) to the bright (moonshine) sides of the Moon is used to determine nightly anomalies in the terrestrial albedo, with the aim is of quantifying sustained monthly, annual and/or decadal changes. We find two modest decadal scale cycles in the albedo, but with no significant net change
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  • Median stack images of P/2016 G1 obtained with the OSIRIS instrument of the 10.4m GTC through a Sloan r′ filter, at the indicated dates. North is up, East to the left. The directions opposite to Sun and the negative of the orbital velocity motion are show
    We present deep imaging observations of activated asteroid P/2016 G1 (PANSTARRS) using the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias ( GTC)  from 2016 late April to early June.  Activated asteroids are objects in orbits typical of asteroids with unlike origin in the cometary reservoirs (the Oort Cloud or the trans-neptunian belt), that ejected dust by any mechanism: sublimation of volatiles (like comets do); collision with another asteroid or rotational disruption. The images of P/2016 G1 show a dust cometary-like coma and were analysed by comparing them with simulated images obtained using a computed
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  • Top panel: orbital phase shift at the time of the inferior conjunction (orbital phase 0), Tn, of the secondary star in the black hole X-ray binary Nova Muscae 1991 versus the orbital cycle number, n, folded on the best-fitting parabolic fit. The error bar
    We present new medium-resolution spectroscopic observations of the black hole X-ray binary Nova Muscae 1991 taken with X-Shooter spectrograph installed at the 8.2-m VLT telescope. These observations allow us to measure the time of inferior conjunction of the secondary star with the black hole in this system that, together with previous measurements, yield an orbital period decay of (dP/dt)= −20.7±12.7 ms yr −1 (−24.5 ± 15.1 μs per orbital cycle). This is significantly faster than those previously measured in the other black hole X-ray binaries A0620-00 and XTE J1118+480. No standard black
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  • Wide angle view from the Teide Observatory towards the east. Above the horizon you can see the planet Venus, an a little higher up and to the left of Venus is comet Catalina (C/2013 US10). The lights and villages are on Grand Canary. J.C. Casado-staryeart
    Several telescopes at the Teide Observatory (IAC) followed comet Catalina with the aim of characterizing its orbit dynamically. It should be possible to see the central zone of the comet with the naked eye, but to see details you would need binoculars.
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