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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  • Amanar: under the same sky
    Press release
    Amanar: under the same sky
    Today marks the official start of this outreach project in astronomy, which promotes scientific education and supports the young people and the teachers who live in the saharaui refugee camps. The activities of astronomical popularization and the visits to the Canary Observatories will start on July 20th, and will last until October, when an international team, with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) will travel to the saharaui refugee camps near Tinduf, in Algeria. Amanar, which means The Pleiades” in Berber, is an astronomical outreach project to inspire the
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  • Image of the opening of the IAU Symposium 355
    Press release
    The hidden Universe: inauguration of the IAU Symposium
    In the University of La Laguna today the conference of the International Astronomical Union about the diffuse light in the sky, organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias was inaugurated. This meeting brings together over a hundred astronomers in a variety of fields from over 20 countries.
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  • The anti-correlation between the amount of metals and the star formation rate when comparing galaxies with similar stellar mass. Galaxies with more (lower image) and less (upper image) star-forming regions (the blue clumps) are shown.
    Research news
    Within galaxy variations in the chemical composition are responsible for the fundamental relation
    The so-called "fundamental metallicity relation" (FMR) has been known for almost 10 years, and it states that galaxies of the same stellar mass but larger star formation rate have more chemically primitive gas. It is thought to be fundamental because it naturally arises from the stochastic feeding of star-formation from external metal-poor gas accretion, a process extremely elusive to observe but essential according the cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. Galaxies transform gas into stars at a rate that quickly exhaust their gas reservoir. Therefore, a continuous supply of external
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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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