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.
The two spectrographs on the Gran Telescopio Canarias have reached their full operating level and have become two of the most requested instruments for observing time on this major telescope which has produced over 500 publications in high level journals and has accumulated over 10,000 citations.
A study carried out by IAC researcher Susana Iglesias-Groth has detected molecules of pure carbon in one of the nearest star formation regions to the Solar System. The results of this work have recently been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Fullerenes are carbon molecules , whose structure contains pentagons and hexagons, which often appear in key molecules for life . They are also the third most stable form of carbon, together diamond and graphite. A study performed by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Susana Iglesias
Accretion disc winds are observed in accreting black holes across the full range of masses. In stellar-mass black holes, X-ray winds have been recently established as a fundamental property of their most radiatively efficient phases, the so-called soft states, impacting on the entire accretion process. However, these hot and powerful winds are scarcely observed during the dimmer hard states, where most of the black holes of the Universe exist and kinetic feedback from jets dominates. The disappearance of the wind is a matter of strong debate and has been suggested to be related to different
A team of astronomers of the CARMENES consortium, with participants form the Institutode Astrofísica de Canarias, has discovered a planetary system around the red dwarf star GJ 3512, at some 30 light years from Earth, with an unusual gas giant planet whose excentric orbit could imply the presence of another massive planets. In the study the 40 cm telescope of the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) at the Teide Observatory, was used. This discovery is published today in the journal Science.
We present the detection of fullerenes C 60 and C 70 in the star-forming region IC 348 of the Perseus molecular cloud. Mid-IR vibrational transitions of C 60 and C 70 in emission are found in Spitzer IRS spectra of individual stars (LRLL 1, 2, 58), in the averaged spectrum of three other cluster stars (LRLL 21, 31, and 67) and in spectra obtained at four interstellar locations distributed across the IC 348 region. Fullerene bands appear widely distributed in this region with higher strength in the lines of sight of stars at the core of the cluster. Emission features consistent with the three
Galaxy formation remains one of the major open problems in astrophysics today. There is a wide range of mechanisms that control the transformation of gas into stars in galaxies, compounded by the cosmological evolution of structure, along with complex feedback processes. An observational approach targets general trends in large distributions of galaxies. On a diagram plotting colour versus mass, the distribution of galaxies gets split into a bimodal structure, featuring a region of red, passively-evolving galaxies (termed the red sequence), and a so-called blue cloud, made up of star-forming
