A study led by the researcher of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias Maitane Urrutia-Aparicio has shown the relevance of sunrise on Easter Sunday, one of the most important Christian festivities, in the orientation of Romanesque churches on the Camino de Santiago. This work exposes the close relationship between the sky and the orientation of the constructions of the Jacobean Route. It also shows that medieval societies already included temporal symbolism in the construction of their temples. The latest research results have been published in the journal Sustainability. "The main
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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Many of the most basic and important physical phenomena are determined by a set of “fundamental constants”, whose values are experimentally known to high accuracy. A key aspect is to know whether they are “universal constants”, i.e., whether they have always had the same value across the Universe and throughout its history . Here we made use of data from the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in order to determine the value of the fine structure constant 8 thousand million years ago (when the Universe was just 40% its current age) by measuring spectral transitions in a
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The president of the BBVA Foundation, Carlos Torres Vila, visited the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma) to learn about the work being done by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The most recent collaboration between the two institutions has been a research project led by astronomer Johan Knapen Koelstra and funded by the BBVA Foundation as part of its Programa de Ayudas a Equipos de Investigación en el área de Big Data. The president of the Foundation visited the GTC and the Cherenkov telescopes (MAGIC and LST), where he received explanations on the progress
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We present the results of our spatially resolved investigation into the interplay between the ages of the stellar populations and the kinematics of the warm ionised outflows in the well-studied type II quasar Markarian 34. Utilising integral field spectroscopic (IFS) data, we determine the spatial distribution of the young stellar population (YSP; age < 100 Myr) using spectral synthesis modelling. We also employ the 5007 [OIII] emission line as a tracer of the warm ionised gas kinematics. We demonstrate a spatial correlation between the outer edges of the advancing side of the outflow and an
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Patricia Bessiere, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has led research which has used data from the KECK telescope in Hawaii to understand the impact that active galactic nuclei have on star formation in their host galaxies. The results are published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. One of the key questions that astronomers are trying to answer is ‘Why do galaxies look the way they do?’. Computer simulations of how galaxies formed and evolved suggest that there should be many more very large galaxies than we actually
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All disc-accreting astrophysical objects produce powerful disc winds. In compact binaries containing neutron stars or black holes, accretion often takes place during violent outbursts. The main disc wind signatures during these eruptions are blue-shifted X-ray absorption lines, which are preferentially seen in disc-dominated ‘soft states’. By contrast, optical wind-formed lines have recently been detected in ‘hard states’, when a hot corona dominates the luminosity. The relationship between these signatures is unknown, and no erupting system has as yet revealed wind-formed lines between the
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