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.

List view
  • Image of several lines of Geminides observed from the Teide Observatory in the early morning of 14/12/2013. The telescope in the foreground is the OGS (ESA) and above the Teide is the constellation of Orion. Credit: J.C. Casado (StarryEarth).
    Press release
    Lyrids 2020: wishes through the window
    On the night of 21st April we will be treated to the maximum of the Lyrids meteor shower. Just as for the other recent astronomical events we will have to see them from home, so that we will need to be very patient, because they will appear with a frequency of barely one every 10 or 15 minutes.
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  • Impresión artística de la estrella HD 93396 y su planeta. Crédito: ESA.
    Press release
    The CHEOPS mission, in which the IAC is participating, observes its first exoplanets
    CHEOPS, the new exoplanet mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) in coordination with Switzerland, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating along with other European instituttions, has successfully complete its almost three month period of the verification and calibration of its instrument, with better results than expected. Astrophysicists from the IAC are leading a group of researchers and engineers who recommend the type of observations to monitor the behaviour of the satellite during its time in space and, as part of the science team, participate in
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  • Artistic rendition of the re-ionisation process. Each dot is a galaxy, which ionises its surroundings forming a bubble. These bubbles can grow depending of the ionising power of each galaxy. If the galaxies are close together the bubbles can merge and form a much larger bubble. With time all the bubbles will merge till the Universe become re-ionised. Ionisation is the process under which high energy photons from the galaxies kick out the electron from the neutral hydrogen atoms thus leaving them ionised.
    Research news
    An ionised bubble powered by a proto-cluster at z = 6.5
    We show herein that a proto-cluster of Lyα emitting galaxies, spectroscopically confirmed at redshift 6.5, produces a remarkable number of ionising continuum photons. We start from the Lyα fluxes measured in the spectra of the sources detected spectroscopically. From these fluxes we derive the ionising emissivity of continuum photons of the proto-cluster, which we compare with the ionising emissivity required to reionise the proto-cluster volume. We find that the sources in the proto-cluster are capable of ionising a large bubble, indeed larger than the volume occupied by the proto-cluster
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  • Artists impression of an active galactic nucleus. Credit: University of Boston-Cosmovision
    Press release
    La Palma telescopes participate in the discovery of a young blazar produced by the merger of two galaxies
    An international team of scientists has obtained the first unequivocal detection of a very high speed jet of matter emitted by a galaxy in the process of merging with another. The flux of particles and radiation, which is emitted by the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy and which is observed face on, shows that it is a precursor structure to the formation of a blazar, one of the most energetic objects known. This discovery was made by combining observations from several telescopes, among them the Gran Telescopio Canarias and the William Herschel Telescope at the Roque de
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