Towards the end of their lives some 95% of stars evolve into red giants which lose their mass via a “stellar wind”. Eventually they end up as planetary nebulae, ionized gas with a central hot star, a white dwarf. Here we report ALMA data on massive red giant (asymptotic giant branch, AGB) stars, displaying a spiral structure which show that these stars are not individual and have a binary companion. This offers an alternative explanation to the high rates of mass loss which it was thought were present towards the end of the lives of the most massive AGB stars. We show that these stars lose
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.
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The Catholic University of Louvain, in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna, leads the first Asteroseismological study of high mass stars, using NASA telescopes.
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Last Monday the GTC observed the asteroid 2019 DS1 in the context of a collaborative programme between the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) in which researchers from the Solar System group at the IAC are participating.
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The OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) has discovered, on the spiral galaxy Messier 106, a system of globular clusters whose unusual distribution and motion, wich could be a relic from the the “cosmic noon”.
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200 nights of observation were needed, from both northern and southern hemispheres, to complete the biggest panorama of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. This IAC project, funded by the FECYT, has obtained the biggest panoramic image ever taken of our Galaxy without the use of professional telescopes.
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Four years ago, an international team (USA, Japan and Europe) carried out an unprecedented suborbital space experiment called CLASP-1, motivated by theoretical investigations carried out at the IAC by Javier Trujillo Bueno and his research group. After the outstanding success of that mission, a few days ago NASA has launched CLASP-2.
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