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.

List view
  • Image of the Cygnus-X region near the Cygnus OB2 association. 2MASS J20395358+4222505 is the star with the red border (revealing the high extinction) near the top left corner. (Courtesy of the GALANTE project, I.P. J. Maíz Apellániz).
    Research news
    The nature of an extreme B supergiant in Cygnus
    2MASS J20395358+4222505 is an obscured early B supergiant near the massive OB star association Cyg OB2. Despite its bright infrared magnitude (Ks= 5.82) it has remained largely ignored because of its dim optical magnitude (B= 16.63, V= 13.68). In a previous work we classified it as a highly reddened, potentially extremely luminous, early B-type supergiant. We obtained its spectrum in the U, B and R spectral bands during commissioning observations with the instrument MEGARA@GTC. It displays a particularly strong Hα emission for its spectral type, B1 Ia. The star seems to be in an intermediate
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  • 2MASS J20395358+4222505
    Press release
    Astronomers find in the Milky Way an unusual blue supergiant star travelling at high velocity
    An international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has found one of the most massive and luminous stars in our galaxy, behind a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust. It is a supergiant, with a mass almost 50 times the mass of the Sun, with a radius almost 40 times the solar radius, and a luminosity approaching a million times that of our own star, and has been given the descriptor 2MASS J20395358+4222505. But its most disconcerting aspect for the researchers is a variation in its velocity of
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  • ALMA cuásar
    Press release
    Supermassive black holes change the central regions of galaxies
    Cristina Ramos Almeida, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has led research which used data from the ALMA telescope in Chile to understand how supermassive black holes impact the host galaxies they inhabit. The results are published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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  • Abell 370
    Press release
    IAC scientists complete an unprecedented study of the masses of over 500 clusters of galaxies
    A team of researchers from the cosmology group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has obtained one of the most accurate measurements of the masses of clusters of galaxies, and of their relation with the amount of hot gas in these clusters. To do this they have studied the dynamics of the galaxies in 570 clusters selected from the catalogue produced by the Planck satellite (ESA). This study has been produced during four years of work, in which over 10,000 spectra have been obtained with the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de los
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  • Proxima Centauri Planets
    Press release
    A sub-Earth confirmed in the planetary system of the closest star to the Sun
    An international team of astronomers, co-led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the presence of a new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. It is the third planet detected in this star and one of the lowest mass planets ever discovered, with only a quarter of the mass of the Earth. The study, published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, uses observations made with the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. Proxima Centauri is the
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