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.

  •  Imagen de grupo de la reunión anual del consorcio científico SPECULOOS, en la que participa el Premio Nobel Didier Queloz / Inés Bonet (IAC)
    La ciudad de La Laguna acoge la reunión anual del consorcio científico SPECULOOS, responsable del telescopio Artemis, ubicado en el Observatorio del Teide. Este encuentro reúne a destacados investigadores de instituciones de renombre internacional, incluyendo el Massachusetts Institute of Techonology (MIT), la Université de Liege, la University of Cambridge y el Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), entre otros centros de investigación. El objetivo principal de las investigaciones que se llevan a cabo con el telescopio Artemis es la detección de planetas de tipo terrestre que orbitan
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  • Sunrise III moments before take-off in July 2024.
    At the present time ground-based observatories have a wide range of instruments which can study the solar surface in the visible and infrared ranges. But it is not possible to combine these observations with those in the near ultraviolet, which cover the wavelength range from 200 to 400 nanometres, nor to maintain them for long periods due to the turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere. In this context, the Sunrise III mission, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is collaborating, “ has become the first observatory to obtain spectropolarimetric data simultaneously in the
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  • An illustration of an M-dwarf star covered in starspots.  NASA/ESA/STScI/G. Bacon.
    A team of astronomers led by ICE-CSIC analyzed for the first time a long radio-observation of a scallop-shell star in a pioneer study. The team observed the star using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) located in Pune (India), and related it to the photometric information from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Las Cumbres Global Telescope Observatory. Scallop-shell stars are a recently discovered class of young M dwarfs. More than 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs, although there are only around 50 recently confirmed scallop-shell stars. They show
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  • Recreation of a burst, identified as CSS161010, in which a small black hole swallows a star. Credits: Gabriel Pérez (IAC)
    The team led by Claudia Gutiérrez from the ICE-CSIC and IEEC has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in La Palma. The CSS161010 burst reached its maximum brightness in just 4 days in a small galaxy 500 million light-years away from us. An international scientific team, led by the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) and the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), has managed to detect an exceptionally fast and bright cosmic burst in a small
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  • Relación entre la SFR media para las galaxias con y sin AGN
    Recent observational studies suggest that feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs)—the energetic centres powered by supermassive black holes—may play an important role in the formation and evolution of dwarf galaxies, contrary to the standard thought. We investigated this using two sets of 12 cosmological magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the formation of dwarf galaxies: one set using a version of the AURIGA galaxy formation physics model including AGN feedback and a parallel set with AGN feedback turned off. Our results reveal that AGNs can suppress the star formation (SF) of dwarf
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  • Omega Centauri
    Omega Centauri is a large globular cluster, containing almost ten million stars, in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus, which has been studied to understand its stellar kinematics, the motions of its stars under the action of the gravitational forces which act on them. A research team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has just published a study which shows that a group of black holes dominates the movements of its stellar kinematics. This result can be extended to certain other structures in the universe and goes against some previous claims about the role of low
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