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.

  • accretion_disks_pulses
    Accretion disks around compact objects are expected to enter an unstable phase at high luminosity. One instability may occur when the radiation pressure generated by accretion modifies the disk viscosity, resulting in the cyclic depletion and refilling of the inner disk on short timescales. Such a scenario, however, has only been quantitatively verified for a single stellar-mass black hole. Although there are hints of these cycles in a few isolated cases, their apparent absence in the variable emission of most bright accreting neutron stars and black holes has been a continuing puzzle. Here
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  • Pleiades Open Cluster
    After comparative studies of a sample of almost 50 open stellar clusters of different ages in the Milky Way, research led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) with collaboration by the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, shows that when these star clusters age they lose the majority of their less massive members. This result confirms that there are internal dynamical processes in open clusters caused by their long journeys through the Galaxy, which bring about the expulsion of these low mass stars. The study, published in the journal
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  • Stellar ages are key to several fields of astrophysics such as exoplanet research, galactic-archeology, and of course stellar physics. Obtaining the ages of stars is however not straightforward and requires stellar modeling. The most widely used technique only requires stellar colors or temperature and surface gravity, but the uncertainties are quite large. This technique is most efficient for stars belonging to clusters, as they were born from the same molecular cloud and share the same ages. In the last decades, based on the study of stellar acoustic waves, asteroseismology became the most
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  • Poster of the CLASP2.1 Scientific Meeting
    From 18 to 20 October, scientists from the USA, Japan and Europe meet at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) to discuss the results of the third CLASP space experiment to study the magnetic field of the solar chromosphere and the science of future solar missions. Several years ago, an international scientific team began developing a series of novel suborbital space experiments, with the goal of measuring the intensity and polarization of the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun emitted from one of the outer layers of its atmosphere, the chromosphere, very close to the base of the
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  • Instalation MiNiO Qaleraliq
    Between 27th August and 7th September the Shelios 2023 expedition tool a group of researchers and students at the south of Iceland and Greenland, where they set up two experiments to measure the natural darkness of the arctic night, and from where they broadcast the aurora borealis. Among the apparatus they installed is the autonomous MiNiO ( Meteo Nano Observatory) controller, developed by the Technological Institute for Renewable Energies (ITER), for the Interreg EELabs project, coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). As well as making people aware of the problems of
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  • The amount and complexity of data delivered by modern galaxy surveys has been steadily increasing over the past years. New facilities will soon provide imaging and spectra of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Extracting coherent scientific information from these large and multi-modal data sets remains an open issue for the community and data-driven approaches such as deep learning have rapidly emerged as a potentially powerful solution to some long lasting challenges. This enthusiasm is reflected in an unprecedented exponential growth of publications using neural networks, which have gone
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