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.

  • Turbulence caused by convection beneath the surface of the Sun and other stars produces acoustic vibrations that can be observed through movements on the surface and the resulting variations in brightness. Photograph courtesy of: HAO
    When we look at the Sun we cannot penetrate beyond its outer surface, the photosphere, which emits the photons that make up the radiation we can see. So how can we find out what is inside it?
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  • First results of Herschel and the HerMES extragalactic survey.
    ESA's Herschel Space Observatory was launched on 14 May 2009. After a short commissioning and performance verification period, the science demonstration observations started in September 2009. Herschel is now carrying out routine science observations. The three instruments (SPIRE, PACS and HIFI) are working extremely well. The IAC is part of the SPIRE and PACS instrument consortia and has contributed flying hardware and software. The first results of the many Herschel Key Projects were presented at the ESLAB 2010 symposium in ESTEC (May 2010) and have been published in July 2010 in a special
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  • Left: comparison of ULAS1350 with the other four known L subdwarfs previously known. Right: Artist view of the orbit and position of ULAS1350 in our Galaxy. As it can be seen from the figure, subdwarfs are located in the halo of our Galaxy.Credits: Nicola
    The Gran Telescopio CANARIAS open new prospects to characterise the oldest population of stars in our Galaxy with the discovery of a cold and distant low-metallicity star A new object with an age of thousands of millions of years and a mass of one tenth of the Sun, placing it at the frontier between low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, has been discovered as the furthest of its class in Milky Way. Nicknamed ULAS1350, this subdwarf could become on of the key element to improve our knowledge on the first steps of the formation of our Galaxy.The team of European astronomers responsible for the
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  • A long-standing issue in solar astrophysics concerns the strength and structure variations with height of the magnetic field in the chromosphere of the quiet Sun. Our empirical knowledge on this issue has remained vague notwithstanding the qualitative information provided by high resolution monochromatic images of the solar atmosphere taken at various wavelengths across strong spectral lines like H-alpha showing a mass of cell-spanning fibrils as a flattened carpet, with upright ones jutting out from network patches. Unfortunately, such images do not provide quantitative information on the
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  • Recent observations of the rotation curve of M31 show a rise of the outer part that cannot be understood in terms of standard dark matter models or perturbations of the galactic disk by M31?s satellites. Here, we propose an explanation of this dynamical feature based on the in?uence of the magnetic ?eld within the thin disk. We have considered standard mass models for the luminous mass distribution, a Navarro?Frenk?White model to describe the dark halo, and we have added up the contribution to the rotation curve of a magnetic ?eld in the disk, which is described by an axisymmetric pattern
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