A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics unveils a powerful way to determine the size of dark matter haloes—the massive, invisible structures that host galaxies—by simply measuring how large galaxies appear in deep astronomical images. Researchers Ignacio Trujillo and Claudio Dalla Vecchia, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), demonstrate that galaxy size can serve as a precise proxy for halo size, offering measurements up to six times more accurate than previous methods. Using the cutting-edge EAGLE cosmological simulations

The discovery, made in collaboration between the IAC Solar System Group and Light Bridges, reveals the rotation period of comet 3I/ATLAS The Two-metre Twin Telescope (TTT) has made a pioneering discovery in astronomy: the first detection of a jet of gas and dust and its periodic modulation in an interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS. The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, provides the first evidence of localised activity from an interstellar nucleus, offering unique insight into the nature of a celestial body that formed outside our Solar System. An extraordinarily normal

A multidisciplinary team of astrophysicists, neuroscientists, engineers, and musicians has unveiled a pioneering method to “listen” to the structure of the human brain. Published in Nature Scientific Reports , the study presents the first higher-order sonification applied to structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. This technique involves transforming three-dimensional information about the brain into sound, taking into account the spatial relationships and complex structure of the data. To do this, mathematical tools originally developed to study the large-scale structure of the

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, among the tiniest and faintest galaxies known, may hold the key to understanding one of the Universe’s biggest mysteries: the true nature of dark matter. A new study reveals that even a single collision between dark matter particles every 10 billion years — roughly the age of the Universe — is enough to explain the dark matter cores observed in these small systems. These galaxies, which contain only a few thousand stars, are dominated by dark matter and have relatively simple evolutionary histories. That makes them ideal cosmic laboratories for testing theories

During October, the Adaptive Optics System team at the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTCAO) of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the technical team at the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan), successfully completed the integration of the GRANCAIN instrument into the world's largest optical-infrared telescope. The installation was carried out at the GTCAO outlet on the telescope's Nasmyth B platform, a key step in initiating performance testing of the new adaptive optics system. This is the first scientific instrument to operate using the GTC's adaptive