Severo Ochoa Programme

Research News

  • INT and 2023 DZ2

    An international scientific team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate, confirms that the asteroid, discovered with the Isaac Newton telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), follows an orbit synchronised with that of Jupiter, which reduces the probability of a collision with our planet in the coming decades. The celestial body is very solid, metallic, rotates ten times every hour and is about 40 metres long. The study is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Asteroid 2023 DZ2, detected in February with the

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  • Toi-1853 b

    An international team of researchers, with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has discovered an extremely dense Neptune-sized planet, which challenges the conventional theories about the formation and evolution of planets. It was first identified with NASA’s TESS satellite, and the present studies were made with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The results of the study have been published in the journal Nature. It is called TOI-1853b and is really

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  • Comparison between galaxies with and without dark matter

    International research led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) has found the first evidence of a massive galaxy with no dark matter. The result is a challenge to the current standard model of cosmology. The study is published in the specialized journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. A team of scientists, led by the researcher at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL) Sebastién Comerón, has found that the galaxy NGC 1277 does not contain dark matter.This is the first time that a massive galaxy (it has a mass several times that of the

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  • Image of the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888), a ring nebula associated with a galactic Wolf-Rayet star, in which significant temperature variations have been observed in the gas it contains. Credit: Daniel López / IAC

    H II regions are ionized nebulae associated with the formation of massive stars. They exhibit a wealth of emission lines in their spectra that form the basis for estimation of chemical composition. The amount of heavy chemical elements is essential to the understanding of important phenomena such as nucleosynthesis, star formation and chemical evolution of galaxies. For over 80 years, however, a discrepancy exists of a factor of around two between heavy-element abundances (the so-called metallicity) derived from the two main kinds of emission lines that can be measured in nebular spectra

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  • HD 192575

    An international collaboration, with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), determines with an unprecedented level of precision the mass, age and rotation profile of the core of a massive pulsating star. Known as HD 192575, it has been observed by the NASA space telescope TESS continuously for more than a year. The results shed new light on how such stars are internally structured and how they evolve until their death, when they explode as supernovae and form neutron stars and black holes. The scientific team has also used observations made with the Mercator

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  • Triptófano en IC 348

    The IAC researcher Susana Iglesias-Groth has discovered the existence of tryptophan, an amino acid essential for the formation of proteins and the develoment of living organisms, within a stellar system in the Perseus Cloud. She did this using data from the Spitzer Space Observatory. The results of this finding are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Tryptophan is one of the 20 amino acids considered essential for the formation of proteins, which are key macromolecules for the development of life on Earth. This amino acid has many spectral features in

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