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.

  • Averaged Spitzer spectra in the MIR of LRLL 21, 31 and 67, solid line and 4 interstellar locations (broken line) in IC348. The location of Fullerenes, organic molecules and water are indicated.
    We present the detection of fullerenes C 60 and C 70 in the star-forming region IC 348 of the Perseus molecular cloud. Mid-IR vibrational transitions of C 60 and C 70 in emission are found in Spitzer IRS spectra of individual stars (LRLL 1, 2, 58), in the averaged spectrum of three other cluster stars (LRLL 21, 31, and 67) and in spectra obtained at four interstellar locations distributed across the IC 348 region. Fullerene bands appear widely distributed in this region with higher strength in the lines of sight of stars at the core of the cluster. Emission features consistent with the three
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  • The evolutionary phases of galaxies against the dispersion of velocities of the stars (which scales with the total mass). The sample used (gray), the red sequence, green valley and blue cloud are represented. The new definition (left) allows to study in detail the galaxies in the green valley.
    Galaxy formation remains one of the major open problems in astrophysics today. There is a wide range of mechanisms that control the transformation of gas into stars in galaxies, compounded by the cosmological evolution of structure, along with complex feedback processes. An observational approach targets general trends in large distributions of galaxies. On a diagram plotting colour versus mass, the distribution of galaxies gets split into a bimodal structure, featuring a region of red, passively-evolving galaxies (termed the red sequence), and a so-called blue cloud, made up of star-forming
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  • Image, left-hand panel, and reflectance spectrum, right-hand panel, of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) obtained by the 10.4~m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), located at the El Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain), which is managed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) together with the Teide Observatory in the island of Tenerife.
    The spectrum acquired by GTC of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) reveals that this object has a surface composition not unlike that found in Solar System comets. Shortly before dawn on September 13th, Julia de León, Miquel Serra-Ricart, Javier Licandro, all members of IAC's Solar System Group, and Carlos Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, from the Complutense University of Madrid, obtained high resolution images and visible spectra of comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) using the OSIRIS instrument at the 10.4m GTC, installed in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma). Observations were
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  • Radial profiles of the star formation rate (per unit mass) for the bulges (reddish colours) and discs (bluish colours) in our sample of ETGs. Different profiles represent the average distribution of the specific star formation rate for the bulge/disc components within four different mass bins. The averaged radial profiles are normalized to the galaxy effective radius.
    Early-type galaxies (ETGs) were historically considered as ‘boring’ objects by astronomers. This galaxy category encompasses lenticular and elliptical galaxies, which were thought as morphologically featureless systems with no star formation and therefore of little interest. However, with the advent of powerful integral field spectrographs and deep photometric images, ETGs have demonstrated not to be such ‘boring’ systems, but complex galaxies with a variety of dynamical, photometric, and stellar population’s properties. In fact, a major question of current astrophysics is still to determine
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  • The comparison between the observed Spitzer spectrum (in black) and the synthetic spectral energy distribution (SED; in red) of a dual dust chemistry AGB star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We report the luminosity and effective temperature of the star, and the following parameters for the internal and outer dust shells: optical depth (at 1 µm), dust temperature, dust composition and distance from the central star.
    During the final stages of their lives, stars with masses between one and eight times the mass of the Sun evolve along the asymptotic giant branch (AGB). AGB stars expand and loss a major fraction of their mass through stellar winds. The low temperature and high density of AGB winds provide ideal conditions for the condensation of dust grains in their circumstellar envelopes. Gas and dust are expelled into the interstellar medium, becoming an essential component for the formation of new stars and planets. Therefore, studying the type of dust (solid state organic or inorganic components) and
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  • Participantes del Festival Hispanoamericano de Escritores durante su visita al Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos. Crédito: Juan Antonio González Hernández / IAC.
    The participants in the second Hispano-American Festival of Authors which is taking place in Los Llanos de Aridane (La Palma) paid a visit, yesterday, to the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory during a day when Astronomy played the main role. During the afternoon there was a panel discussion in tribute to the Founding Director of the instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Francisco Sánchez, and at night the opportunity to observe the sky with amateur telescopes. "The Inspiring Force of the Universe. Tribute to Francisco Sánchez" was the topic of the panel discussion which brought together
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