He was one of the “Seven Samurai” who in 1986 published that the Milky Way, together with its neighbour galaxies, in clusters and superclusters, forms a huge concentration of matter which they named the “Great Attractor”. Today, Professor Roger Davies is the President of the European Astronomical Society (EAS), whose Board of Directors recently met at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). Davies, who is Professor at the University of Oxford, worked for many years with the William Herschel and Isaac Newton telescopes, at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. Because of this, he is

Presentation of the book “Observing the Sun from Tenerife. An adventure above the sea of clouds” “The latitude of the islands, Teide, and the trade-winds have contributed to the story of the Sun in Tenerife”. This phrase by solar physicist Manuel Vázquez Abeledo was noted during the presentation of his most recent book Observing the Sun from Tenerife. An adventure above the sea of clouds (just in Spanish) by another solar physics from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), his friend and colleague José Antonio Bonet, who gave a summary of it. The event took place last Friday at the

Scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and the University of California San Diego, detect large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere of the "primitive star" called J0815+4729. This finding, reported in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters today, provides an important clue on how oxygen and other chemical elements were produced in the first generations of stars in the Universe. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe after hydrogen and helium. It is essential for all forms of life on Earth

The Sun is not the live coal that Anaxagoras described. We can imagine hell in its interior, and we know that there are darker spots on its surface which, when discovered, were shown to be incompatible with the Aristotelian principle of the perfection of the heavenly bodies. We have learned a great deal about our star since then, but even now we do not know the answer to some important questions about the source of energy of our Solar System, the main source of life. These were the words of Jeffrey R. Kuhn, doctor in Physics from Princeton University, and currently Professor at the Institute

This astronomical event will be broadcast live via the channel sky-live.tv in the early hours of January 4th, with the collaboration of the European project EELabs. Together with the Geminids and the Perseids, this is the most intense meteor shower of the year. The three most spectacular meteor showers of the year are the Perseids (in August) the Geminids (in December) and the Quadrantids in the first week of January. Although the Perseids are the best known, the maximum is in a holiday period with mild night-time temperatures, the Geminids and the Quadrantids never let us down, with an