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
  • High-resolution images of the bright boulders (arrows) during Hayabusa2 proximity operations. Especially, the images obtained during the first touchdown operation (a-c) show much smaller bright fragments in regolith everywhere (adapted from Fig.1 in Tatsumi et al. 2021).
    Research news
    Collision of C-type Ryugu’s parent body with a rocky object
    Hayabusa2’s optical navigation camera (ONC) found many anomalously bright boulders on the dark surface of the carbonaceous (or C-type) asteroid Ryugu. Observations with ONC and the near-infrared spectrometer (NIRS3) indicates that at least six of those bright boulders exhibit reflectance spectra consistent with exogenous origin; their spectra are similar to rocky (or S-type) asteroids. This means that the bright boulders resulted from collisional mixing between Ryugu’s parent body and S-type asteroid(s). On Bennu, the asteroid explored by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, bright boulders with spectra
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  • TOI-178
    Press release
    Astronomers discover a surprising system of six exoplanets which orbit rhythmically
    An international collaboration in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias take part, has discovered a unique planetary system made up of six exolplanets, of which five perform an unusual rhythmic dance, while they orbit their star. Even so, the sizes and masses of the planets are not in any ordered pattern. This finding, which is published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophyisics, poses a challenge to current theories of planet formation.
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  • Lanzamiento de DRAGO
    Press release
    Successful launch of DRAGO, IACTEC’s first infrared camera
    This afternoon the DRAGO infrared camera, developed by the team at IACTEC-Space, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and integrated into the ION satellite carrier of the Italian company D-Orbit, has been successfully launched into space on Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket. The Transporter-1 mission, as it is called, was carried out without a hitch during the first hour of the launch window which opened at 15:00 h UTC, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida (USA).
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  • HST imaging and narrow and broad components ALMA maps of ID2299. The top-left panel shows the HST-F814W imaging of the source, sampling the UV rest-frame emission from young stars. The top (bottom) rows show the CO(2-1), CO(5-4), [CI](2-1) and CO(7-6) ALMA maps of the narrow (broad) emission
    Press release
    A challenge to models of star-formation truncation in massive galaxies
    An international study published in Nature Astronomy, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is a participant, suggests that the feedback winds do not have a direct impact on braking the formation of stars in massive galaxies, and attributes the process to other events such as ejection by huge tides caused when galaxies merge.
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  • Geminids on the Teide Observatory
    Press release
    An eclipse, a superconjunction, and the last meteor shower of the year: Geminids 2020
    During the nights of 12th and 13th of December we will enjoy the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. This will be broadcast live from the Teide Observatory (Tenerife) and from the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory ( La Palma) via the sky-live.tv channel, with the collaboration with the Energy Efficiency Labs (EELabs project of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Programme of Astronomical Outreach of SODEPAL and the Innovation Service of the Cabildo Insular of La Palma. During the past decade the Geminids have always bid farewell to the year by producing over 100 meteors
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  • Distribution of dark matter and its tracers (halos). Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Press release
    New techniques are developed for producing synthetic catalogues of galaxies
    The group of Cosmology and Large Scale Structure at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has developed, using the BAM (Bias Assignment Method) numerical computer code, a novel strategy to generate precise synthetic catalogues of galaxies to reproduce the observations of the census of galaxies, which will help to yield valuable cosmological information and to elucidate the nature of dark energy.
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