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.

  • Recreación artística de MAXI J1820+070
    A international team of astronomers, led by the University of Southampton and with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has used the camera HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias and NASA’s NICER space observatory to make a high frame-rate movie of a growing black hole system. In the process they have discoverd violent flares in visible light and in X-rays which give new clues to help understand the immediate surroundings of these intriguing objects. The results of this study are published in the prestigious journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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  • Physics Nobel Prize Winners 2019
    The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) warmly congratulate James Peebles (Princeton University), Michel Mayor (University of Geneva) and Didier Queloz (Universities of Geneva and Cambridge) on the award of the Physics Nobel Prize 2019. The Swedish Academy awarded the prize "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos". For Mayor and Queloz, the award recognises their discovery, published in 1995, of the first planet outside the solar system, orbiting a solar-type star
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  • Artist’s impression of the star GJ 3512, a red dwarf of approximately one tenth of the mass of the Sun, on which the newly discovered exoplanet GJ 3512b, a gas giant of high mass, orbits an unusual planet in this type of planetary systems.
    Surveys have shown that super-Earth and Neptune-mass exoplanets are more frequent than gas giants around low-mass stars, as predicted by the core accretion theory of planet formation. We report the discovery of a giant planet around the very-low-mass star GJ 3512, as determined by optical and near-infrared radial-velocity observations. The planet has a minimum mass of 0.46 Jupiter masses, very high for such a small host star, and an eccentric 204-day orbit. Dynamical models show that the high eccentricity is most likely due to planet-planet interactions. We use simulations to demonstrate
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  • Participantes en HC2NP2019
    HC2NP2019, the second conference on "Hadronic Contributions to New Physics Searches" organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Puerto de la Cruz brought together, for a week, international experts in particle, nuclear, and atomic physics. At the meeting the latest advances in experimental checks on the "Standard Model of Particle Physics" were discussed, among them dark matter, the origin of flavour structures, and the conservation of charge symmetry in the strong interaction. Maxim Pospelov , of the University of Minnesota and the Perimeter Institute, an expert in
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  • Ceremonia de cambio de propiedad del NOT
    The Universities of Turku (UTU) and Aarhus (AU) are the new owners of the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) situated in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM). The two institutions take over from the Nordic Optical Telescope Scientific Associations (NOTSA), a non-profit organization created in 1984 by the Reseearch Councils of Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, with the later incorporation of Iceland, in 1997. On 1 October, a delegation from both universities took part in a simple event at the ORM, which was also attended by representatives of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
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