A study carried out by a team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has shown that an unusual thin structure of stars, recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, could be a galaxy seen edge-on. This finding goes against the original interpretation in which a fleeing supermassive black hole was leaving a trail of stars in its wake. The new interpretation is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters. A mysterious trail of stars formed eight thousand million years ago and recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope has been a challenge

Using first-of-their-kind observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international scientific team, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates, finds a unique, minuscule galaxy that emitted its light more than 13 billion years ago. The galaxy, detected through gravitational lensing, is one of the smallest ever discovered at this distance and has an extremely high star formation rate for its size. This discovery could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that were present shortly after the Universe came into existence. The paper is published in

A team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has made, with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan) and the Subaru telescope, the largest and deepest follow-up to date of a black hole collision previously detected in gravitational waves. The observations showed no optical signal in the direction of the phenomenon, which means that if this black hole merger emitted any light at all, it was fainter than the detection limit of these two telescopes and their instruments. This result imposes an

A study led by the researcher Susana Iglesias of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has detected the presence of large quantities of complex organic molecules in one of the nearest star forming regions to the Solar System. The results of this have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The scientists Susan Iglesias-Groth, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and Martina Marín-Dobrincic of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena have discovered the presence of numerous prebiotic molecules in the star formation region IC348 of the

An international scientific team, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates, has discovered a large reservoir of hot gas in the still-forming galaxy cluster around the Spiderweb galaxy. The finding reveals that this protocluster, far from dispersing, will end up gravitationally bound for the rest of its existence. Located at an epoch when the Universe was only 3 billion years old, this is the first time such a hot gas has been detected at such distances. The study, published in Nature, confirms that galaxy clusters, one of the largest known structures in the