An international team of astrophysicists that includes researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) has uncovered an enormous bubble current being ‘blown’ by the regular eruptions from a binary star system within the Andromeda Galaxy. The results have been published today in 'Nature'.

An international group of scientist led by researches from the IAC detect the evaporation of atmospheric helium on the giant exoplanet WASP-69b.

A joint observational campaign with the MAGIC telescopes at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (Garafía, La Palma) and the VERITAS array at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (Tucson, Arizona), has detected a new source emitting very-high-energy gamma rays from an unusual system consisting of a massive star and a pulsar. The study has just been published in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Jairo Méndez Abreu and Adriana de Lorenzo-Cáceres, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have discovered a peanut-shaped structure in the inner bar of a double-barred galaxy close to the Milky Way. Structures of this type, previously detected only in outer, or single, bars are useful tracers of the evolution of the galaxies.

After two years travelling through space, the NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has started to obtain images of the mission target, primitive asteroid Bennu. As part of the Scientific Team of this mission, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Javier Licandro and Julia de León have already started to work in the calibration of this images in preparation for the ones that will be obtained in December 2018 using color filters.

The study, led by Paula Izquierdo, a doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has gone deeply into the analysis of this exceptional white dwarf, which shows periodic transits produced by fragments of a shredded planetesimal. The observations used for this research were obtained with the Gran Telescopio Canarias and with the Liverpool Telescope.