The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is collaborating with this multidisciplinary festival for Astrophysics and Space SciencesThe second event, which has the slogan "Beginnings: the making of the modern cosmos" will take place in Tenerife and La Palma from 22 to 28 September 2014

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The discovery of this striking pair is published today in Nature

Stellar-mass black holes have all been discovered through X-ray emission, which arises from the accretion of gas from their binary companions (this gas is either stripped from low-mass stars or supplied as winds from massive ones). Binary evolution models also predict the existence of black holes accreting from the equatorial envelope of rapidly spinning Be-type stars (stars of the Be type are hot blue irregular variables showing characteristic spectral emission lines of hydrogen).  Of the ~80 Be X-ray binaries known in the Galaxy, however, only pulsating neutron stars have been found as

The incidence and properties of present-day dwarf galaxies hosting massive black holes (BHs) can provide important constraints on the origin of high-redshift BH seeds. Here we present high-resolution X-ray and radio observations of the low-metallicity, star-forming, dwarf-galaxy system Mrk 709 with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). These data reveal spatially coincident hard X-ray and radio point sources with luminosities suggesting the presence of an accreting massive BH (M BH ∼ 10 5−7 M ⊙). Based on imaging from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)

We have obtained two-dimensional velocity fields in the ionized gas of a set of eight double-barred galaxies, at high spatial and spectral resolution, using their Hα emission fields measured with a scanning Fabry-Perot spectrometer. Using the technique by which phase reversals in the non-circular motion indicate a radius of corotation, taking advantage of the high angular and velocity resolution we have obtained the corotation radii and the pattern speeds of both the major bar and the small central bar in each of the galaxies; there are few such measurements in the literature. Our results