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.

  • 2nd LIOM International Workshop
    From 14 to 16 February, the second scientific meeting of the Laboratory for Innovation in Opto-Mechanics (LIOM) will be held at the IACTEC building managed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the Science and Technology Park of La Laguna (Tenerife). This project is dedicated to the development of new optical and mechanical technologies that will form part of the next generation of telescopes capable of detecting biomarkers on exoplanets. One year after its creation, the IAC's Laboratory for Innovation in Opto-Mechanics (LIOM), is holding its second international meeting
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  • The Geminids 2020 meteor shower over the Tejeda Valley (Grand Canary).
    The results obtained from the over two hundred photometers put in place by the Interreg EELabs project during the past four years have been used to evaluated the impact of artificial night lighting on the night-time ecosystems of the achipelagos, especially on sea birds, but also to make the local people aware of this type of contamination. In Macaronesia (the collective name for the Atlantic Islands comprising the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde), natural night-time darkness is preservedonly in highly isolated natural reserves, such as the islands of Corvo and Graciosa (the
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  • Solar corona in visible light during a solar eclipse
    The POLMAG research group of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has released the public version of P-CORONA, a novel computer program for calculating the intensity and polarization of the light emitted by the million-degree plasma of the solar corona. This plasma diagnostic technique allows scientists to study the magnetic field of the solar corona by comparing their calculations with observations from the most advanced solar telescopes, such as DKIST and Aditya-L1. The solar corona is the outermost region of the solar atmosphere, where the explosive events that can seriously
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  • In the 90s, the COBE satellite discovered that not all the microwave emission from our Galaxy behaved as expected. Part of this signal was later assigned to a fresh new emission component, spatially correlated with the Galactic dust emission, which showed greater importance in the microwave range of frequencies. It has been named since as “anomalous microwave emission”, or AME. The current main hypothesis to explain the AME origin is that it is emitted by small dust particles which undergo fast spinning movements. In Fernández-Torreiro et al. (2023), we study the observational properties of
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  • Distant galaxies identified by JWST
    Thanks to images obtained by the James Webb Telescope (JWST), an international scientific team in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates has been able to verify that galaxies in the early universe are usually flat and elongated, and not round or spiral like the nearest galaxies. International research has found, by analysing high-resolution, infrared images of the JWST, that flattened oval disc and tube-shaped galaxies were much more common when the universe was between 600 million and 6 billion years old. In contrast, the nearest galaxies have clearly defined
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  • Black hole of Andromeda
    A team of scientists led by the Observatory of Munich University and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias have obtained direct visualization of the process of feeding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Andromeda galaxy. The study reveals the existence of long filamentary structures of gas and dust which move in a spiral starting at a distance from the black hole and ending up at the black hole itself. The results, which have been published in the Astrophysical Journal, were obtained using images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. The Andromeda Galaxy, which is
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