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.

  • La nebulosa Cabeza de Caballo

    ESA’s Euclid space mission reveals its first full-colour images of the cosmos. Never before has a telescope been able to create such razor-sharp astronomical images across such a large patch of the sky, and looking so far into the distant Universe. These images illustrate the telescope's potential to create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the Universe to date. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has led one of the first five Euclid Early Release Objects (ERO) programmes. 95% of our cosmos appears to be made of these mysterious ‘dark’ entities But we don’t understand what

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  • John Beckman, 60 years in Astrophysics

    On November 6th and 7th a meeting will be held in the Museum of Science and the Cosmos in La Laguna, to celebrate the dedication to astrophysics during 60 years of John Beckman, Emeritus Research Professor of the IAC. Among those present will be scientists who have collaborated with him, and some of his doctoral students, who include the present Director of the IAC, Rafael Rebolo López, and the Deputy Director, Casiana Muñoz Tuñón. John arrived at the Institute in 1984, invited by the Director at that time, Francisco Sanchez Martínez, and the Professor of Astrophysics Carlos Sánchez Magro

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  • Yesterday, 30 October 2023, from the telescope itself at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, the WEAVE instrument, a powerful state-of-the-art multi-fibre spectrograph, was publicly unveiled. The inauguration ceremony brought to La Palma the leaders of the science funding agencies from the partner countries of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING), as well as a strong representation from the 500 members of the science teams and the organisations involved in the design and construction of WEAVE, making it the largest ever gathering of people inside the dome

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  • 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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