Its height is 45 m, and its diameter is 23 metres; it weighs close to 100 tonnes which can be moved in less than 20 seconds to capture the gamma rays emitted by the most energetic phenomena in the universe. This is the telescope which was inaugurated this morning at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in the La Palma town of Garafia by the Nobel Laureate in Physics Takaaki Kajita, and by the Spanish minister Pedro Duque, among other outstanding scientific and political figures.

The prototype of the four large size telescopes which will be a part of the CTA North network, referred to as LST-1, will be inaugurated at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on October 10th . The ceremony will be attended by political authorities, and the highest level representatives of scientific insituttions in Japan, Germany, and Spain, the main countries involved in its construction.

An international team of researchers, including David S. Aguado, Jonay González and Carlos Allende Prieto of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a star with extremely low metallicyt, one of the oldest in the Milky Way, and for that reason an excellent messenger from the early universe.

The “Observatorio de las Energías Renovables y la Eficiencia Energética” Foundation is organizing on October 4th, a seminar with this title at the headquarters of the Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Tenerife. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias will participate in this set of lectures, with talks by Antonia María Varela Pérez and Federico de la Paz.

A study published recently in Nature magazine, in which Ana Monreal-Ibero, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is a participant, reveals the presence of a hitherto undetected component of the universe: large masses of gas surrounding distant galaxies.

The IAC and the Canary Island Observatories are celebrating this anniversary with a series of activities in the framework of the “Protect your sky” initiative, with which they will remind people of the importance and the scope of the “Law for the Protection of the Astronomical Quality of the Observatories of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias”.