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.

  • It will be its closest approach to the Earth (its perigee), at a distance of around 107 million kilometres, which is very close, considering that it originated in the Oort Cloud, at a distance from us of about a light year (some 9.5 billion kilometres). Although on those nights it will attain maximum brightness, it has not been as bright as was expected, so that it is not easy to find it with the naked eye. So binoculars are necessary, and a sky map, and we need to be at a place with dark sky to see the central zone of the comet. In spite of that it can be found near the Great Bear, and this
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  • El presidente del Gobierno de Canarias visita el IAC Hoy, viernes 8 de enero, el presidente del Gobierno de Canarias, Fernando Clavijo, ha visitado la sede del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), en La Laguna, para reunirse personalmente con el Director del centro, Rafael Rebolo, y conocer de primera mano los proyectos en los que está involucrado el Instituto. En dicho encuentro, se le han planteado distintos asuntos que conciernen al estado actual del IAC, como el progreso de su plan estratégico y el de las grandes instalaciones telescópicas para los Observatorios de Canarias
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  • Distributions of 830 galaxies in the BOSS Great Wall (BGW). The colour scale shows the local environmental density in terms of mean densities for each galaxy. With a total diameter of 271 h-1 Mpc and average redshift of 0.47 for its sources, this superclu
    Superclusters are the largest over-dense, relatively isolated systems in the cosmic web. They provide us invaluable information about the large-scale structure formation at different cosmic epochs, as well as they are excellent places for understanding galaxy evolution in detail. Thanks to the new SDSS-III data, we can extend our knowledge of superclusters to the redshift range above z=0.4. We used data from the twelfth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Using a sample of more than 500,000 galaxies up to z~0.8, we reconstructed the large-scale luminosity-density field and
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  • Average, normalized spectra corresponding to days 9 to 11 of the outburst. During this period the X-ray, optical and radio fluxes dropped by three orders of magnitude from the outburst peak. The spectra are very rich in emission lines that, while typical
    V404 Cygni is a black hole within a binary system where a black hole of around 10 times the mass of the Sun is swallowing material from a very nearby star. During this process material falls onto the black hole and forms an accretion disc, whose hotter, innermost zones emit in X-rays. On June 2015 V404 Cygni went into outburst after a quiescence of over 25 years. During this period its brightness increased on million fold in a few days, becoming the brightest X-ray source in the sky. Optical observations carried out with the GTC 10.4m discovered the presence of a wind of cold material, which
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  • Upper panel: Example of a spectrum contained in the Fabry-Pérot data where we detect three pairs of emission peaks symmetrically spaced with the emission of the H ii region, which correspond to the presence of three expanding shells.Lower panel: Expansion
    Using a specialized technique sensitive to the presence of expanding ionized gas, we have detected a set of three concentric expanding shells in an H ii region in the nearby spiral galaxy M33. The detection was done using Fabry-Pérot spectroscopy, which allows us to map the ionized gas emission line Hα with exceptional precision in the spatial and spectral coordinates. We also took long-slit spectra of colisionally excited emission lines, which showed that the shells are likely originated from supernova explosions. Using the flux and the kinematics we estimated the kinetic energy in the
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