This week Thomas Soifer, Gregory Fahlman, and Masanori Iye, members of the Board of Governors of the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) International Observatory, visited during the week the installations of the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in La Laguna, and the Teide and Roque de los Muchachos Observatories.

Galaxy-cluster gravitational lenses can magnify background galaxies by a total factor of up to ~50. Here we report an image of an individual star at redshift z = 1.49 (dubbed MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1) magnified by more than ×2,000. A separate image, detected briefly 0.26″ from Lensed Star 1, is probably a counterimage of the first star demagnified for multiple years by an object of ≳3 solar masses in the cluster. For reasonable assumptions about the lensing system, microlensing fluctuations in the stars’ light curves can yield evidence about the mass function of intracluster stars and

The exoplanet team of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating in this mission scheduled for launch in 2028 which, it is expected, will shed light on how planetary systems are formed and evolve. The mission will also analyse the chemical composition of the atmospheres of 1,000 exoplanets.

We report ground-based spectrophotometry of KIC 8462852, during its first dimming events since the end of the Kepler mission. The dimmings show a clear colour-signature, and are deeper in visual blue wavelengths than in red ones. The flux loss' wavelength dependency can be described with an Ångström absorption coefficient of 2.19±0.45, which is compatible with absorption by optically thin dust with particle sizes on the order of 0.0015 to 0.15 μm. These particles would be smaller than is required to be resistant against blow-out by radiation pressure when close to the star. During

The Franco-Algerian researcher, who received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in developing methods to cool and trap atoms using laser radiation visited the installations of the Headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna and the Teide Observatory accompanied by the Director and researchers at the Institute.

Specialists from different research institutions, such as the European Space Agency (ESA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) dealt, for two days, with questions related to the present and future of this telescope.