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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  • 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).
    Research news
    Powerful winds driven by a supermassive black hole
    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.
    Press release
    Daniel Nóbrega, with a doctorate at the IAC, is awarded the SEA prize for the best thesis of 2018
    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.
    Research news
    A distance of 13 Mpc resolves the claimed anomalies of the galaxy lacking 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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  • The central five minutes of the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 (Idaho, USA). At the ends (left and right) images with DN 5 solar filter, the rest without filter. Combination of the second contact (left sequence), third contact (right sequence) and crown (center). Credit: J.C. Married / StarryEarth.
    Press release
    Chile and Argentina feature in the next solar eclipse
    On July 2nd there will be a total eclipse of the sun which will touch land only in Chile, Argentina, and on the island of Oeno a small corral atol in the centre of the Pacific. This astronomical event will be broadcast live via the web sky-live.tv, with the collaboration of the Cerro Tololo Observatory (Chile), and STARS4ALL, a project in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating.
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  • ARTEMIS telescope (SPECULOOS array) at the Teide Observatory.
    Press release
    Inauguration of the ARTEMIS telescope at the Teide Observatory
    This new telescope for finding Earth-like planets which may transit some of the smaller cooler stars in the solar neighbourhood joints the SPECULOOS network of 1m diameter telescopes which include the University of Liège (Belgium), Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), of the US, and now the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).
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