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.

  • Image, left-hand panel, and reflectance spectrum, right-hand panel, of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) obtained by the 10.4~m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), located at the El Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain), which is managed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) together with the Teide Observatory in the island of Tenerife.

    The spectrum acquired by GTC of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) reveals that this object has a surface composition not unlike that found in Solar System comets. Shortly before dawn on September 13th, Julia de León, Miquel Serra-Ricart, Javier Licandro, all members of IAC's Solar System Group, and Carlos Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, from the Complutense University of Madrid, obtained high resolution images and visible spectra of comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) using the OSIRIS instrument at the 10.4m GTC, installed in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma). Observations were

    Advertised on
  • The comparison between the observed Spitzer spectrum (in black) and the synthetic spectral energy distribution (SED; in red) of a dual dust chemistry AGB star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We report the luminosity and effective temperature of the star, and the following parameters for the internal and outer dust shells: optical depth (at 1 µm), dust temperature, dust composition and distance from the central star.

    During the final stages of their lives, stars with masses between one and eight times the mass of the Sun evolve along the asymptotic giant branch (AGB). AGB stars expand and loss a major fraction of their mass through stellar winds. The low temperature and high density of AGB winds provide ideal conditions for the condensation of dust grains in their circumstellar envelopes. Gas and dust are expelled into the interstellar medium, becoming an essential component for the formation of new stars and planets. Therefore, studying the type of dust (solid state organic or inorganic components) and

    Advertised on
  • Radial profiles of the star formation rate (per unit mass) for the bulges (reddish colours) and discs (bluish colours) in our sample of ETGs. Different profiles represent the average distribution of the specific star formation rate for the bulge/disc components within four different mass bins. The averaged radial profiles are normalized to the galaxy effective radius.

    Early-type galaxies (ETGs) were historically considered as ‘boring’ objects by astronomers. This galaxy category encompasses lenticular and elliptical galaxies, which were thought as morphologically featureless systems with no star formation and therefore of little interest. However, with the advent of powerful integral field spectrographs and deep photometric images, ETGs have demonstrated not to be such ‘boring’ systems, but complex galaxies with a variety of dynamical, photometric, and stellar population’s properties. In fact, a major question of current astrophysics is still to determine

    Advertised on
  • Supercomputer at the Centro de Astrofísica de La Palma

    The team led by the researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Mohammad Akhlaghi has obtained a European grant to develop a project focused on the handling of large quantities of data, and the capacity to be able to reproduce any scientific result by another research group.

    Advertised on
  • Kilonova Evento 2016 GTC

    An international team of astronomers, including researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the CSIC has found evidence of a “kilonomva” in the data from a gamma ray burst detected in August 2016. This is a phenomenon similar to the supernovae which produce large quantities of heavy elements, such as gold and platinum. This event is similar to another explosion detected by LIGO in 2017, for which the combined observation of light and gravitational waves opened the door to an understanding of this type of objects. The results are to be published in the journal Monthly

    Advertised on
  • Sistema planetario GJ 357

    A team of astronomers, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has found three new planets orbiting a star, one of which might have conditions favourable for life. The discovery was possible with data from NASA’s TESS satellite, and with data from several ground-based observatories, among them the Spanish Calar Alto Observatory with its CARMENES instrument. The results are published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

    Advertised on