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.

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  • Poster of the talk "Formation and evolution of the large scale structures of our Universe: the clusters of galaxies"
    Press release
    Public lecture: “Formation and evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe: clusters of galaxies”
    Tomorrow, Friday 26th November at 18.00 in the Museum of Science and the Cosmos of Museums of Tenerife there will be an outreach talk “Formation and evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe; clusters of galaxies” by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) José Alberto Rubiño Martín. The lecture, organized in the framework of the XXXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics , will be public and will be in Spanish. After a year without being held due to COVID-19, from 23 November to 1 December, the IAC Winter School returns to Tenerife, attended by
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  • Lithium in Brown Dwarf
    Press release
    Astronomers discover ancient brown dwarf with lithium deposits intact
    A team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Mexico, has discovered lithium in the oldest and coldest brown dwarf where the presence of this valuable element has been confirmed so far. This substellar object, called Reid 1B, preserves intact the earliest known lithium deposit in our cosmic neighbourhood, dating back to a time before the formation of the binary system to which it belongs. The discovery was made using the OSIRIS spectrograph on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), at the Roque de
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  • Opening of Winter School 2021
    Press release
    Clusters of galaxies: features of the XXXII IAC Winter School
    Today in the multiple use hall of IACTEC in La Laguna the XXXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), was inaugurated. In this edition, which will take place between 23rd November and 1st December, 55 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from more than 15 countries will participate with their presence at a variety of lectures, practical sessions and seminars by world-leading experts . This year, due mainly to the difficulty of travelling from some countries, 10 extra students
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  • NUV-optical-NIR colour-colour diagrams of our sample of Milky Way stars, as a density plot. As reference, a stellar track covering a range of surface temperatures (6500-18000 K) is shown in several cases of dust extinction.
    Research news
    Constraints on the dust extinction law of the Galaxy
    This work explores data from a few surveys, most notably the serendipitous catalogue from the NASA SWIFT mission that made use of the NUV/optical camera UVOT (originally designed to pinpoint the location of Gamma Ray Bursts). We select a sample of 10452 stars, cross matched with Gaia DR2 and 2MASS data, covering a large spectral window, from NUV to NIR. We compare these data with generic dust extinction models that parameterise the wavelength dependence into the steepness of the law, the net extinction in the V band (Av), and the strength of the prominent NUV bump. We recover well known
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  • GTC light curve of PG1144+005 (top) and its Fourier amplitude spectrum showing the detected pulsation periods (bottom).
    Research news
    Discovery of pulsations in the nitrogen-rich PG1159 star PG 1144+005
    Up to 98% of all single stars will eventually become white dwarfs - stars that link the history and future evolution of the Galaxy, and whose previous evolution is engraved in their interiors. Those interiors can be studied using asteroseismology, utilizing stellar pulsations as seismic waves. The pulsational instability strips of DA and DB white dwarf stars are pure, allowing for the important generalization that their interior structure represents that of all DA and DB white dwarfs. This is not the case for the hottest pulsating white dwarfs, the GW Vir stars: only about 50% of white
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  • Top: final transmission spectrum and retrieved models for HAT-P-65b. The white circles refer to the data. The blue line and shading show the results from the full retrieval, while the red line and shading from the K-muted retrieval. Bottom: retrieved temperature-pressure (T-P) profiles and mass fractions for the full retrieval (left two) and K-muted retrieval (right two), respectively.
    Research news
    Detection of TiO and Na in the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter HAT-P-65b
    We present the low-resolution transmission spectra of the puffy hot Jupiter HAT-P-65b (0.53 MJup, 1.89 RJup, Teq = 1930 K), based on two transits observed using the OSIRIS spectrograph on the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS. The transmission spectra of the two nights are consistent, covering the wavelength range 517–938 nm and consisting of mostly 5 nm spectral bins. We perform equilibrium-chemistry spectral retrieval analyses on the jointly fitted transmission spectrum and obtain an equilibrium temperature of 1645 (-244+255) K and a cloud coverage of 36 (-17+23) %, revealing a relatively
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