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.
2012 DA14 will pass some 27,700 kilometres from the surface of the Earth next Friday, 15 February. It will be the closest ever non-impacting encounter since the orbits of these bodies have been studied, although it won't be visible to the naked eye
On Friday night, 15 February, asteroid 2012 DA14 maked a close approach to our planet. In Spain, it first was seen from the peninsula at 21:00 local time (UT 20:00*) and half-an-hour later it was visible from the Canaries at 20:30 local time (UT 20:30). It was the closest approach by an asteroid since we have been able to predict their orbits. The IAC will show direct time-lapse videos on this page, as well as links to retransmissions. (*) In winter Universal Time (UT) coincides with local Canarian time. Uno de los vídeos ha sido seleccionado como Astronomical Image of the Day JUST TO GIVE
IAC researchers have confirmed the possible existence of large fullerene molecules in the Universe. These are the most complex molecules discovered to date
Stellar-mass black holes (BHs) are mostly found in X-ray transients, a subclass of X-ray binaries that exhibit violent outbursts. None of the ~50 galactic BHs known show eclipses, which is surprising for a random distribution of inclinations. Swift J1357.2−093313 is a very faint X-ray transient detected in 2011 by the Swift telescope. Our spectroscopic evidences show that it contains a BH in a 2.8h orbital period. High-time resolution optical light curves display profound dips of up to 0.8 mag (50% of the optical flux) in 2min without X-ray counterparts. The observed properties are best
We present new 10.4 m-GTC/OSIRIS spectroscopic observations of the black hole X-ray binary XTE J1118+480 that confirm the orbital period decay at (dP/dt) = −1.90 ± 0.57 ms yr −1. This corresponds to a period change of −0.88 ± 0.27 μs per orbital cycle. We have also collected observations of the black hole X-ray binary A0620–00 to derive an orbital period derivative of (dP/dt)= −0.60 ± 0.08 ms yr −1 (−0.53 ± 0.07 μs/cycle). Angular momentum losses due to gravitational radiation are unable to explain these large orbital decays in these two short- period black hole binaries. The orbital period
