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.

  • Left: Chromospheric image of a chromospheric active region at -161 mÅ from the core of the Ca II 8542 line, where fibrils are covering almost the entire field-of-view. Right: Circular polarization image (Stokes V) at the same wavelength, quantifies the st
    Fibrils are thin elongated features visible in the solar chromosphere in and around magnetized regions. Because of their visual appearance they have been traditionally considered a tracer of the magnetic field lines. To our best knowledge, this common conception has never been actually put to test, probably because a proper empirical determination of the chromospheric magnetic field is very challenging, requiring high-resolution spectro-polarimetry in chromospheric lines. In this work we challenge that notion for the first time by comparing their orientation to that of the magnetic field
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  • NGC 4013 is a nearby Sb edge-on galaxy known for its “prodigious” HI warp and its “giant” tidal stream. Previous work on this unusual object shows that it cannot be fitted satisfactorily by a canonical thin+thick disk structure. We have produced a new decomposition of NGC 4013, considering three stellar flattened components (thin+thick disk plus an extra and more extended component) and one gaseous disk. All four components are considered to be gravitationally coupled and isothermal. To do so, we have used the 3.6µm images from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G).We
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  • Image Caption: Artist’s impression of the graphenes (C24) and fullerenes found in a Planetary Nebula. The detection of graphenes and fullerenes around old stars as common as our Sun suggests that these molecules and other allotropic forms of carbon such a
    Nobel-prize winning scientists (2010), Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, synthesized graphene in the laboratory in 2004. Just seven years later, this material of extraordinary strength, thinness and elasticity may have been found in space. The first evidence of the possible existence of C 24 - a flat two-dimensional molecule, one atom thick, possibly a "small piece of graphene - in space has been found. To confirm beyond a doubt that what has been detected is actually C 24, laboratory spectroscopy would have to be carried out, something which is practically impossible with current
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  • Artistic composition of the fullerenes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons found in a R Corona Borealis star rich in hydrogen. The non-detection of these molecules in the vast majority of very hydrogen-poor R Coronae Borealis stars contradicts the terres
    The largest known molecules in space, fullerenes, do not occur in hydrogen-poor environments as previously thought. Fullerenes are very stable molecules and difficult to destroy, they have a structure very similiar to that of a soccer ball and made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in three-dimensional spherical structures and patterns of alternative hexagons and pentagons. These molecules were synthesized in the laboratory by chemists Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley, who thus received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kroto and Smalley, according to the laboratory experiments, believed that
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  • Left: time evolution of a weak circular polarization patch. The black and white background represents the magnetic flux density computed in the weak field approximation, saturated to +- 20 Mx cm-2. Blue lines represent iso-magnetic flux densities of -130,
    As we enhance the spatial resolution and sensitivity of spectro-polarimetric measurements, it becomes increasingly evident that highly dynamic magnetic fields permeate the whole quiet Sun. These weak magnetic flux concentrations emerge somewhat preferentially in granules, where plasma motions are more favorable for the magnetic fields to rise across the solar atmosphere. Surprisingly (due to their weak nature), organized structures in the form of Omega-shaped loops survive convective motions and reach higher layers, at least the lower chromosphere (Martínez González & Bellot Rubio 2009
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  • Footnote: Projected mid-section trajectory of the sunbeam that reaches the lunar disk targeted by the telescope at 21:36UT on 16 August 2008. Overplotted, the SO2 cloud (a usual volcanic cloud tracer) on 15, 16 and 17 August (red, green and blue, respecti
    The Moon's changeable aspect during a lunar eclipse is largely attributable to variations in the refracted unscattered sunlight absorbed by the terrestrial atmosphere that occur as the satellite crosses the Earth's shadow. The contribution to the Moon's aspect from sunlight scattered at the Earth's terminator is generally deemed minor. However, our analysis of a published spectrum of the 16 August 2008 lunar eclipse shows that diffuse sunlight is a major component of the measured spectrum at wavelengths shorter than 600 nm. The conclusion is supported by two distinct features, namely the
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