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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  • An artistic illustration that combines a real image of a galaxy with a representation of the stellar orbits within it, to show how the study of the movements of stars allows us to reconstruct the history of galaxies.
    Press release
    Extragalactic archaeology provides new clues about the formation of the galaxies
    An international review article in which IAC researcher Jesús Falcón Barroso is a contributor, explains how the study of stellar populations in galaxies outside the Milky Way and the Local Group, using techniques which are called “extragalactic archaeology”, permits the reconstruction of the processes of formation and evolution of those galaxies. This article has been published in the Annual Review of Astronomy & Astrophysics , one of the most prestigious journals in this field, to which only five researchers of the IAC have contributed during the lifetime of the Institute. How did the
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  • Artistic impression of the V Sagittae star system, where a superdense white dwarf extracts matter from its larger companion. Unable to assimilate all the transferred mass, a bright ring of gas forms around it.
    Press release
    The IAC and the ULL participate in the discovery of an unusual ‘stellar dance’ that could culminate in an explosion visible from Earth
    A greedy white dwarf star in our own Milky Way galaxy is devouring its closest celestial companion at a rate never seen before, according to an international study involving the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL). The research, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , found the double star, named V Sagittae, is burning unusually bright as the super-dense white dwarf is gorging on its larger twin in a feeding frenzy. Experts think the stars are locked in an "extraterrestrial tango" as they orbit each other every
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  • R1_mass
    Research news
    A physically motivated galaxy size definition across different state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations
    Measuring galaxy sizes is essential for understanding how they were formed and evolved across time. However, traditional methods based on l ight concentration or isophotal densities often lack a clear physical meaning. A recent study from Trujillo+20 explores a more physically motivated definition: the radius R 1, where the stellar surface density falls to 1 solar masses per parsec square —roughly the threshold for gas to form stars in galaxies like the Milky Way. In this work, Arjona-Gálvez+25 uses over 1,000 galaxies from several state-of-the-art cosmological simulations (AURIGA, HESTIA
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  • Artist's impression of a binary system in which a compact star steals matter from its companion. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
    Press release
    A team with the participation of the IAC and the ULL discovers that massive stars prefer to live in pairs even in galaxies with low metallicity
    Massive stars in metal-poor galaxies often have close partners, just like the massive stars in our metal-rich Milky Way. This has been discovered by an international scientific team in which research staff from the Instituto de Aastrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) participate. They used the European Very Large Telescope in Chile to monitor the velocity of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The research is published in Nature Astronomy . For the past twenty years, astronomers have known that many massive stars in the metal-rich Milky Way have a
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  • The reviewers with the EST team at the IAC headquarters in La Laguna.
    Photomontage
    Preliminary design review of the European Solar Telescope control software successfully completed
    A crucial step forward has been taken in the development of the European Solar Telescope (EST). The preliminary design of three core software systems— the Control System, the Adaptive Optics Real-Time Controller (AO RTC), and the Data Centre — has passed a rigorous international review, confirming their readiness to move into the next phase of development. In early July, the EST software engineering team submitted a detailed set of design documentation for evaluation as part of the Software Preliminary Design Review (SPDR), focusing on the telescope’s Control System, including Adaptive
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  • Artistic impression of the Proxima Centauri system, with the planets Proxima b and Proxima d, the latter confirmed by NIRPS
    Press release
    The IAC leads the first scientific results of NIRPS, the new infrared exoplanet hunter
    The new infrared spectrograph NIRPS, built with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and installed on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, has achieved its first scientific results, with four articles published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and one more accepted for publication. The data confirm its ability to detect Earth-like planets in the infrared for the first time with a precision better than one metre per second. One of the papers, led by IAC researcher Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, confirms the presence of a
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