The Department of Education and Universities (CEU) of the Government of the Canaries, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence, are starting again with joint activities for promoting astronomy, based on the natural resource of the Canary skies, and coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the pioneering “Law of the Sky”.

A team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered a new case of galactic cannibalism in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way, which has caused the merging of two galaxies on the smallest scale so far known.

Scientists from all over the world who are studying high energy astrophysics met today in La Palma, after attending yesterday, at the Roque de los Muchachos, the inauguration of LST-1, the prototype of the four large sized telescopes which will be a part of the CTA North array.

One of the aims of this meeting, which will take place during this week in La Laguna, is to anlayze the current state of the research which is looking for primordial gravitational waves generated a fractio of a second after the Big Bang, and which would serve as a test of the standard model of moden cosmology.

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.