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.

List view
  • (Left) Location of target PNe on an image of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). (Right) Hertzsprung-Russell diagram showing the location of PNe central stars and the theoretical model tracks. The final and corresponding initial masses are indicated on the tracks. Note the remarkable clustering of the brightest PNe central stars (green squares) on the 1.5 Msun track.
    Research news
    Solving the enigma of the brightest planetary nebulae
    Planetary nebulae (PNe) are the ejecta of evolved low-intermediate mass stars present in all stellar systems. Perhaps the easiest thing to do when studying PNe in a galaxy is just counting how many of them appear with a given luminosity, the Planetary Nebula Luminosity Function (PNLF). Not surprisingly, just a few very bright, and many more fainter, PNe populate the PNLF. But, most surprisingly, the bright end bin of the PNLF has a remarkably constant cut-off value in all galaxies and stellar systems studied so far, both young and old, with just a mild, calibrateable dependence on
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  • Average magnetic field of the quiet Sun as inferred from the observational data. Black contours display the frontier between granules and intergranules (i.e., Ic = 1.0, where Ic is the continuum intensity). The magnetic field strength color bar has been clipped at 800 G.
    Research news
    Mapping the hidden magnetic field of the quiet Sun
    The Sun is the only star where we can resolve the intricate magnetism that all convective stars harbor. Yet, more than 99% of its visible surface along the solar cycle (the so-called quiet Sun) is filled with a tangled, unresolved magnetism. These “hidden” fields are thought to store enough magnetic energy to play a role in the heating of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, but its field strength is still not constrained. Previous investigations based on the Hanle effect in atomic lines claim a strong magnetization of about 100 G, while the same effect in molecules show a factor of 10 weaker fields
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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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