Outstanding professionals from the "III Programme for Brazilian Leaders" organized by the Council Spain-Brazil Foundation visited, during December 12th and 13th, the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísisca de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, and the Teide Observatory in Izaña (Tenerife). The Secretary General of the Foundation, Rafael Dezcallar Mazarredo and the participants in this third edition, Carlos E. Higa Matsumoto, Deputy Director for International Affairs in the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications; Daniela Lazzaro, joint director and Head of

This image was obtained during December 12 small hours, from Teide Observatory (IAC). It shows a colorful geminid over the peak of mount Teide. Teide, the highest mountain in Spain, that emerges 7.500m from the bottom of the sea, belongs to its National Park, which is World Heritage. Although meteors normally last less than a second in the sky, cameras are able to catch a chromatic spectrum of color as the meteor advances through the atmosphere. Colors show the meteoroid composition -grains of dust originally ejected from asteroid 3200 Phaethon- as well as atmospheric composition (oxygen and

The European project STARS4ALL and sky-live.tv, bring the shower to your home. Live, from the clear Canary Islands skies. Geminids’ father is a strange asteroid. Phaethon might mean, in the future, the Earth’s destruction.

An international team of scientists, with IAC participation, has discovered that the biggest galaxies in the universe develop in cosmic clouds of cold gas. This finding, which was made possible using radiotelescopes in Australian and the USA, is being published today in the journal Science.

Noemí Pinilla, a researcher at the Florida Space Institute of the University of Central Florida, has a very close relationship with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canrias (IAC). She studied astrophysics at the University of La Laguna (ULL) and after obtaining her doctorate she made the jump across the Atlantic to the NASA Ames Research Center as a postdoc. Now, as on previous occasions, she continues to collaborate with the IAC, to be specific in the preparation of a spectroscopic catalogue of asteroids, and studying the ices and the surfaces of the dwarf planets of the Solar System. Even

La próxima semana, la Agencia Espacial Europea (ESA) decide si lanza en 2020 la misión AIM cuyo objetivo es estudiar al asteroide Dydimos y probar la tecnología necesaria para desviar su trayectoria mediante un impacto. El Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participa en AIM a través de Javier Licandro, Julia de León y Miquel Serra-Ricart, investigadores que forman parte del grupo científico, además de desarrollar un innovador sistema de comunicaciones ópticas de la nave.