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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  • LST-1 en el Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (Garafía, La Palma)
    Press release
    The LST-1 telescope on La Palma detects the Crab Pulsar at very high-energy
    The first prototype of the Large-Size Telescope (LST) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the LST-1, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), has detected an emission of very high-energy gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star at the centre of the nebula of the same name. This observation confirms the successful operation of this telescope, which is being commissioned.
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  • Estrella con manchas magnéticas gigantes
    Press release
    Hot stars are plagued by giant magnetic spots
    An international team of astronomers, in which the researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the Universidad de La Laguna David Jones participates, has discovered giant spots on the surface of extremely hot stars hidden in stellar clusters. Not only are these stars plagued by magnetic spots, some also experience superflare events, explosions of energy several million times more energetic than similar eruptions on the Sun. The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, help astronomers better understand these puzzling stars and open doors to resolving other elusive mysteries
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  • Artistic representation of the planet Proxima b orbiting its star, Proxima Centauri. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Press release
    ESPRESSO confirms the nearest exo-Earth with unprecedented precision
    An international team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias participated, as well as institutions in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has confirmed the presence of the extrasolar planet Proxima b using measurements of radial velocity with the ESPRESSO spectrograph, on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
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  • Artistic representation of the current interaction between the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Press release
    The evolutionary history of the Milky Way determined in more detail than ever
    Thanks to data from the Gaia mission, of the European Space Agency (ESA), and international team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has presented a study which shows the crucial role of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy in the evolution of our galaxy. These results, published in the magazine Nature Astronomy, also hint that the Sun might have been formed due to one of the interactions of this nearby galaxy with the Milky Way.
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  • GTC spectrum corresponding to the period when the P-Cyg profiles indicate the highest wind velocity. The insets show a zoom-in of the characteristic P-Cyg blueshifted absorption, indicating a wind velocity above 2000 km/s (Hα; red, dotted-dashed line).
    Research news
    The changing-look optical wind of the flaring X-ray transient Swift J1858.6-0814
    The large amount of mass and angular momentum carried by disc winds makes them key processes to understand accretion onto compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars. Here we present the discovery of an optical accretion disc wind in the X-ray transient Swift J1858.6-0814, a new binary system discovered in late 2018. Our 90-spectrum data set, taken with the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), reveals the presence of conspicuous P-Cyg profiles in optical lines of helium and hydrogen. The evolution of these features indicates significant variations in the wind velocity, between a
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  • Planet absorption signature. a) In the stellar rest frame, the planetary absorption signal appears close to the expected Keplerian of the planet, superimposed in white with its 1σ uncertainty. Transit contacts are shown by white horizontal dashed lines. The gap around 0 km/s corresponds to the position of the Doppler shadow before its subtraction. b) In the planet rest frame, the shimmer is asymmetric and progressively blueshifts after ingress.
    Research news
    Nightside condensation of iron in an ultrahot giant exoplanet
    Ultrahot giant exoplanets receive thousands of times Earth’s insolation. Their high-temperature atmospheres (greater than 2,000 kelvin) are ideal laboratories for studying extreme planetary climates and chemistry. Daysides are predicted to be cloud-free, dominated by atomic species and much hotter than nightside. Atoms are expected to recombine into molecules over the nightside, resulting in different day and night chemistries. Although metallic elements and a large temperature contrast have been observed, no chemical gradient has been measured across the surface of such an exoplanet
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