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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  • LST-1 en el Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (Garafía, La Palma)
    Press release
    The LST-1 telescope on La Palma detects the Crab Pulsar at very high-energy
    The first prototype of the Large-Size Telescope (LST) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the LST-1, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), has detected an emission of very high-energy gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star at the centre of the nebula of the same name. This observation confirms the successful operation of this telescope, which is being commissioned.
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  • Artistic representation of the planet Proxima b orbiting its star, Proxima Centauri. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Press release
    ESPRESSO confirms the nearest exo-Earth with unprecedented precision
    An international team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias participated, as well as institutions in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has confirmed the presence of the extrasolar planet Proxima b using measurements of radial velocity with the ESPRESSO spectrograph, on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
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  • Artistic representation of the current interaction between the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and the Milky Way. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Press release
    The evolutionary history of the Milky Way determined in more detail than ever
    Thanks to data from the Gaia mission, of the European Space Agency (ESA), and international team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has presented a study which shows the crucial role of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy in the evolution of our galaxy. These results, published in the magazine Nature Astronomy, also hint that the Sun might have been formed due to one of the interactions of this nearby galaxy with the Milky Way.
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  • Planet absorption signature. a) In the stellar rest frame, the planetary absorption signal appears close to the expected Keplerian of the planet, superimposed in white with its 1σ uncertainty. Transit contacts are shown by white horizontal dashed lines. The gap around 0 km/s corresponds to the position of the Doppler shadow before its subtraction. b) In the planet rest frame, the shimmer is asymmetric and progressively blueshifts after ingress.
    Research news
    Nightside condensation of iron in an ultrahot giant exoplanet
    Ultrahot giant exoplanets receive thousands of times Earth’s insolation. Their high-temperature atmospheres (greater than 2,000 kelvin) are ideal laboratories for studying extreme planetary climates and chemistry. Daysides are predicted to be cloud-free, dominated by atomic species and much hotter than nightside. Atoms are expected to recombine into molecules over the nightside, resulting in different day and night chemistries. Although metallic elements and a large temperature contrast have been observed, no chemical gradient has been measured across the surface of such an exoplanet
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  • A snapshot from TESS of part of the southern sky showing the location of ν Indi (marked by the blue circle), the plane of the Milky Way (bottom left) and the southern ecliptic pole (top). These snapshots come from data collected in TESS observing sectors 1, 12 and 13 Credit: J. T. Mackereth.
    Research news
    TESS satellite dates an ancient collision with our galaxy
    Earlier this year, a team of astrophysicists has revealed new insights on an ancient collision that our galaxy the Milky Way underwent with another smaller galaxy called Gaia-Enceladus early in its history. However the details on how and when that collision happened are not precisely known. The study of a single bright star called nu Indi, for which data from the NASA mission TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), the ESA Gaia mission, and ground-based observations were combined, led to better characterize this event. Indeed, by applying a novel approach based on asteroseismology
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  • RGB image of PSZ1 G158.34-47.49, one of the clusters studied, which has a spectroscopic redshift z=0.311. In the image you can see a gravitational lens arc. The photometric image was taken with ACAM/WHT; the spectroscopic data are from DOLORES/TNG.
    Press release
    IAC Scientists have characterized over 200 new clusters of galaxies first detected by the Planck satellite using the telescopes on La Palma
    An international team led by the group of Cosmology with Galaxy Clusters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), including researchers from the University of Paris-Saclay (France) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany) has finished the optical characterization of new clusters of galaxies in the northern hemisphere, detected first by the Planck satellite using tjhe Suyaev-Zel’dovich signal. These studies allow more accurate determination of the mean matter density in the universe and other cosmological parameters. The observations, which have
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