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.

  • Spectral energy distribution (in white; best theoretical fit in blue) of an extremely red old star. The photometric data from Spitzer's IRAC and MIPS instruments are represented in purple. Credits: Dell'Agli et al. (2021) with  background infrared image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, NASA/JPL-Caltech/Meixner(STSCI) and the Sage Legacy Team.
    Modelling dust formation in single stars evolving through the carbon-star stage of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) (i.e., the late evolutionary stages of Sun-like stars) reproduces reasonably well the mid-infrared colours and magnitudes of most of the C-rich sources in low-metallicity galaxies with known distances like the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The only exception to this is a small subset of extremely red objects (EROs). An analysis of the spectral energy distributions of EROs suggests the presence of large quantities of dust, which demand gas densities in the outflow significantly
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  • Attendees at the 2017 11F activities in La Laguna
    For a further year the IAC is celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science with activities to encourage the interest of the younger girls in scientific and technological careers. According to the report “ Women scientists in figures, 2017” the proportion of women in the total of the researchers in Spain has no trisen in the past 10 years, holding steady at 39%. But worse, at later stages in the research career this pecentage drops to 29%. In order to redress the balance on December 15th 2015 the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed 11th February the
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  • Cartel anunciador del proyecto "Habla con Ellas: Mujeres en Astronomía" edición 202. Diseño: Inés Bonet (IAC)
    Women astronomers and engineers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), from the Canary Observatories, and from other collaborating institutions show their work and answer students’ questions in videoconferences with educational centres throughout Spain . Physics and Engineering are fields which are still see by society as “male professions”, and in which women continue to be under-represented. The challenge of awaking interest in these subjects among students, and especially among girls, means facing up to the idea that they are perceived as difficult and with few attractive
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  • High-resolution images of the bright boulders (arrows) during Hayabusa2 proximity operations. Especially, the images obtained during the first touchdown operation (a-c) show much smaller bright fragments in regolith everywhere (adapted from Fig.1 in Tatsumi et al. 2021).
    Hayabusa2’s optical navigation camera (ONC) found many anomalously bright boulders on the dark surface of the carbonaceous (or C-type) asteroid Ryugu. Observations with ONC and the near-infrared spectrometer (NIRS3) indicates that at least six of those bright boulders exhibit reflectance spectra consistent with exogenous origin; their spectra are similar to rocky (or S-type) asteroids. This means that the bright boulders resulted from collisional mixing between Ryugu’s parent body and S-type asteroid(s). On Bennu, the asteroid explored by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, bright boulders with spectra
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  • TOI-178
    An international collaboration in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias take part, has discovered a unique planetary system made up of six exolplanets, of which five perform an unusual rhythmic dance, while they orbit their star. Even so, the sizes and masses of the planets are not in any ordered pattern. This finding, which is published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophyisics, poses a challenge to current theories of planet formation.
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  • Lanzamiento de DRAGO
    This afternoon the DRAGO infrared camera, developed by the team at IACTEC-Space, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and integrated into the ION satellite carrier of the Italian company D-Orbit, has been successfully launched into space on Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket. The Transporter-1 mission, as it is called, was carried out without a hitch during the first hour of the launch window which opened at 15:00 h UTC, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida (USA).
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