Some 40 women astronomers, engineers and technologists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), from IACTEC and from other collaborating institutions are taking part in around ten initiatives to raise awareness of the important contribution of women in Science and to stimulate the interest of girls in scientific and technological careers. The activities are part of the celebrations of 11F, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, and they will extend from February till June. Even though the percentage of women in scientific and technical careers has grown in recent

From 13th to 17th of February, in IACTEC, the technical collaboration zone of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the first scientific meeting of the Laboratory for Innovation in Optomechanics (LIOM) is taking place. This is a project for the development of new optical and mechanical technology which will form part of the next generaton of telescopes, such as the ExoLife Finder (ELF), aimed at the search for life outside the Solar System. The meeting has brought together 30 specialists in optics and photonics from Europe, Canada, and the United States. During the course of this week

An international team of researchers, among them scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the primitive origen of an old star in the Milky Way, using the ESPRESSO instrument. The stars with the least content of metals are considered to be the oldest in the Milky Way, formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which is a small fraction of the age of the universe. These stars are “living fossils” whose chemical composition gives clues about the first stages of the evolution of the universe. The star SMSS1605-1443 was discovered in 2018 and

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) and the WEAVE instrument team present the first observations with this new instrument. This is a powerful latest generation multi-fibre spectrograph which, in synergy with the Gaia satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), will be used to obtain spectra of several million stars in the disc and the halo of our Galaxy, permitting in-depth “archaeology” of the Milky Way. In addition, other galaxies, both nearby and distant, will be studied, some of them detected by the LOFAR radio telescope, in order to get to know their evolution. WEAVE, on the

A recent study, entirely done by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has produced the most complete analysis to date of the intracluster light, the diffuse and faint light emitted by stars in galaxy clusters which are not gravitationally bound to any galaxy. This result was based on data obtained by the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The research gives new clues about the formation processes of galaxy clusters, and the properties of dark matter. The article was published in the specialized journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters . In clusters of galaxies