A international team of astronomers, led by the University of Southampton and with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has used the camera HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias and NASA’s NICER space observatory to make a high frame-rate movie of a growing black hole system. In the process they have discoverd violent flares in visible light and in X-rays which give new clues to help understand the immediate surroundings of these intriguing objects. The results of this study are published in the prestigious journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) warmly congratulate James Peebles (Princeton University), Michel Mayor (University of Geneva) and Didier Queloz (Universities of Geneva and Cambridge) on the award of the Physics Nobel Prize 2019. The Swedish Academy awarded the prize "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos". For Mayor and Queloz, the award recognises their discovery, published in 1995, of the first planet outside the solar system, orbiting a solar-type star

The two spectrographs on the Gran Telescopio Canarias have reached their full operating level and have become two of the most requested instruments for observing time on this major telescope which has produced over 500 publications in high level journals and has accumulated over 10,000 citations.

A study carried out by IAC researcher Susana Iglesias-Groth has detected molecules of pure carbon in one of the nearest star formation regions to the Solar System. The results of this work have recently been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Fullerenes are carbon molecules , whose structure contains pentagons and hexagons, which often appear in key molecules for life . They are also the third most stable form of carbon, together diamond and graphite. A study performed by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Susana Iglesias