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.

  • Image of the opening of the IAU Symposium 355
    In the University of La Laguna today the conference of the International Astronomical Union about the diffuse light in the sky, organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias was inaugurated. This meeting brings together over a hundred astronomers in a variety of fields from over 20 countries.
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  • The anti-correlation between the amount of metals and the star formation rate when comparing galaxies with similar stellar mass. Galaxies with more (lower image) and less (upper image) star-forming regions (the blue clumps) are shown.
    The so-called "fundamental metallicity relation" (FMR) has been known for almost 10 years, and it states that galaxies of the same stellar mass but larger star formation rate have more chemically primitive gas. It is thought to be fundamental because it naturally arises from the stochastic feeding of star-formation from external metal-poor gas accretion, a process extremely elusive to observe but essential according the cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. Galaxies transform gas into stars at a rate that quickly exhaust their gas reservoir. Therefore, a continuous supply of external
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  • Line profiles showing the blueshifted broad components of the ionized/molecular outflow. Fits to the broad (blue), narrow (red), continuum (orange), and total (green) components are shown (shaded areas were used in the determination of the outflow sizes).
    The supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies have a basic influence on their evolution. This happens during a phase in which the black hole is consuming the material of the galaxy in which it resides at a very high rate, growing in mass as it does so. During this phase we say that the galaxy has an active nucleus (AGN, for active galactic nucleus). The effect that this activity has on the host galaxy is known as AGN feedback, and one of its forms are galactic winds: gas from the centre of the galaxy being driven out by the energy released by the active nucleus. These winds can
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  • Daniel Nóbrega-Siverio, Isabel Santos and Concepción Cárdenas, SEA Awards 2019 for the best Spanish Doctoral Thesis.
    The prizewinning thesis, with the title “Eruptive Phenomena in the solar atmosphere: radiative-magnetohydrodynamic models and the development of a numerical code” which was defended in July 2018 at the University of La Laguna, was directed by Fernando Moreno Insertis, Professor at the University of La Laguna and senior researcher at the IAC, and co-directed by Juan Martínez Sykora, of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL) California. Nóbrega Siverio is a postdoctoral researcher at the Rossland Centre for Solar Physics at the University of Oslo, (Norway). In his thesis
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  • The ultra-diffuse galaxy KKS2000]04 (NGC1052-DF2), towards the constellation of Cetus, considered previously a galaxy with no dark matter.
    The claimed detection of a diffuse galaxy lacking dark matter represents a possible challenge to our understanding of the properties of these galaxies and galaxy formation in general. The galaxy, already identified in photographic plates taken in the summer of 1976 at the UK 48-in Schmidt telescope, presents normal distance-independent properties (e.g. colour, velocity dispersion of its globular clusters). However, distance-dependent quantities are at odds with those of other similar galaxies, namely the luminosity function and sizes of its globular clusters, mass-to-light ratio, and dark
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