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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  • La consejera insular de Turismo Raquel Rebollo Morera; el director del IAC, Valentín Martínez Pillet y la consejera insular de Desarrollo Económico, Miriam Perestelo Rodríguez. /Inés Bonet (IAC)
    El Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias agradece el compromiso de la ciudadanía palmera con la protección de sus cielos
    El Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) agradece a la ciudadanía palmera y a sus instituciones su compromiso con la protección de sus cielos en el cumplimiento de la Ley del Cielo y por la cesión de sus cumbres para el estudio científico. Así se ha puesto de manifiesto en la reunión monográfica mantenida por el IAC, el Cabildo Insular de La Palma y los ayuntamientos de la isla celebrada en el Palacio Salazar. En la reunión han participado el director del IAC, Valentín Martínez Pillet; la consejera de Turismo del Cabildo de La Palma, Raquel Rebollo Morera; y la consejera de Promoción
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  • MaNGA galaxies
    Research news
    Constraints on the in situ and ex situ stellar masses in nearby galaxies obtained with artificial intelligence
    The hierarchical model of galaxy evolution suggests that mergers have a substantial impact on the intricate processes that drive stellar assembly within a galaxy. However, accurately measuring the contribution of accretion to a galaxy's total stellar mass and its balance with in situ star formation poses a persistent challenge, as it is neither directly observable nor easily inferred from observational properties. Using data from MaNGA, we present theory-motivated predictions for the fraction of stellar mass originating from mergers in a statistically significant sample of nearby galaxies
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  • The director of IAC, Valentín Martínez Pillet and the team of engineers of the European Solar Telescope, alongside the international panel of reviewers with the telescope model, during the evaluation in Tenerife. / Inés Bonet (IAC)
    Press release
    The European Solar Telescope project under review by an international team of experts
    The IACTEC headquarters has recently hosted the meeting between the engineering team behind the future European Solar Telescope and an international panel composed of some of the world's leading experts in the development of large telescopes and solar observation instrumentation. It is common for major scientific projects to undergo this type of scrutiny during their development as a way to independently verify their quality and viability. The evaluation process began over a month ago with the submission of all the design documentation to the reviewers. In this case, the evaluation focused
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  • ESA’s Hera mission lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space /ESA - S. Corvaja
    Press release
    The IAC is participating in the first European planetary defence mission
    Researchers Julia de León and Javier Licandro of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) are participating in the Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) , successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) on 7th October at 14:52 UTC. This is the first European mission for planetary defence which together with NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid redirection Test) will study the effects of a technique for diverting asteroids called “ kinetic impactor”. The DART probe crashed into the smaller ( Dimorphos) of the two asteroids which form the binary system Didymos, on September
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  • Artist’s impression of the accoustic oscillations of normal (“baryonic”) matter, taken from one of thousands of simulations used in the study/ Francisco-Shu Kitaura & Francesco Sinigaglia
    Press release
    The light from quasars, a key to the measurement of the expansion of the distant universe
    The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of Geneva (Switzerland), the University of Osaka (Japan), and the University of Zhejiang (China) has made a key contribution to a more precise measurement of the expansion of the Universe. This is because they have made an improvement in the precision of the calculation of the scale of the universe in its early stages using the analisis of the distribution of gas in intergalactic space, measurements which reach back to epochs between 10,000 and 12,000 million years ago. This result comes from the análisis of
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  • El director del IAC, Valentín Martínez Pillet, en la inauguración de la XXV Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics.
    Valentín Martínez Pillet y Antonia Varela inauguran la XXV edición de la Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics
    El director del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Valentín Martínez Pillet; y la directora del Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos, Antonia Varela, inauguraron esta mañana la XXV Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics. Esta tradicional escuela organizada por el IAC tiene lugar hasta el próximo 17 de octubre y acoge a 60 estudiantes de máster, doctorado y postdoctorado de trece países distintos que se encontrarán en Tenerife para recibir una visión completa y exhaustiva sobre la evolución de las galaxias. Valentín Martínez Pillet dio la bienvenida al estudiantado y expuso que esta
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