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.
There is a force hidden deep inside galaxies: magnetic fields. Invisible to conventional telescopes, they are a factor in galaxy evolution, regulating the formation of new stars and helping to drive intragalatic gas towards their central supermassive black hole.
One of the most interesting questions for astrophysicists for the past few decades is how and when did the first galaxies form. One of the possible answers to “how” is that star formation in the first galaxies took place at a steady rate, building up a system with increasing mass. Another possibility is that the formation was more violent and discontinuous, with intense bursts of star formation, on short timescales, triggered by events such as galaxy mergers and strong concentrations of gas.
In 2015 and 2019 an international team (USA, Japan and Europe) carried out two unprecedented suborbital space experiments called CLASP and CLASP2, which were motivated by theoretical investigations carried out at the IAC. After the success of such missions, the team has just launched CLASP2.1 from the NASA facility in White Sands Missile Range (New Mexico, USA). The aim is to map the solar magnetic field throughout the chromosphere of an active region. To this end, CLASP2.1 has successfully measured the intensity and polarization of the solar ultraviolet radiation emitted by magnesium and
Newly formed stars have protoplanetary discs around them. A fraction of the material in the disc condenses into planet-forming chunks, and the rest finally falls into the star. Because of their common origin, researchers have assumed that the composition of these chunks and that of the rocky planets with low masses should be similar to that of their host stars. However, until now the Solar System was the only available reference for the astronomers.
A central question regarding ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) is whether they are in a separate category from low-surface-brightness (LSB) galaxies, or just their natural continuation toward low stellar masses. In this Letter, we show that the rotation curve of the gas rich UDG AGC 242019 is well fit by a dark matter halo with an inner slope that asymptotes to ~-0.54, and that such a fit provides a concentration parameter that matches theoretical expectations. This finding, together with previous works in which shallow inner profiles are derived for UDGs, shows that the structural properties of
In a star like the Sun, surface magnetic activity results from the interaction between rotation, convection, and magnetic field. One of the key parameters to study the magnetic activity of stars is the Rossby number, which is the ratio between the surface rotation period of the star and the convective turnover time. The convective turnover time measures the time that takes a bubble of plasma to go from the base of the convective zone in a star like the Sun to the surface, similarly to a bubble reaching the surface in a pan with boiling water heated by the bottom. While the surface rotation
