An international team, with the participation of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has developed a new generation of calibrations that make it possible to estimate the chemical composition (metallicity) of both nearby galaxies and the most distant and early galaxies in the Universe observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. The study is based on the analysis of the largest collection of high-quality spectroscopic observations gathered to date, the result of more than a decade of compilation and analysis work. To understand the origin and evolution of galaxies

An international team, led by a pre-doctoral researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has revealed that the heaviest chemical elements on the surfaces of the youngest massive stars originate from their more evolved companions. The study has been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics . ‘Throughout their lives, stars produce energy by fusing lighter chemical elements into heavier ones.’ “Stars are the universe’s great factories for chemical elements: as they evolve, they take the lighter ones and fuse them into heavier ones, changing their original

On the occasion of International Dark Matter Day, the IAC transversal project “Dark matter: observations, models and detection” — coordinated by G. Battaglia — celebrated its first internal workshop on October 29th at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), with the support of the DiaLoGues project. The IAC transversal project “Dark matter: observations, models and detection”, created in 2026, brings together IAC researchers with complementary expertise united by a common goal: understanding the fundamental nature of dark matter (DM), one of the main constituents of the Universe

When MAXI J0637−430, a binary system containing a black hole, began to fade after a major outburst, something unexpected happened: the outer regions of its disc became more illuminated, rather than less. A study published in Nature Astronomy, led by Montserrat Armas Padilla, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has revealed that this behaviour is due to changes in the shape of the inner part of the disc, which can cast a shadow over the regions furthest from the black hole. During the brightest phase of the outburst, this structure had swollen, blocking some of the