A study led by Anelise Audibert, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), reveals a process that explains the peculiar morphology of the central region of the Teacup galaxy, a massive quasar located 1.3 billion light-years away from us. This object is characterized by the presence of expanding gas bubbles produced by winds emanating from its central supermassive black hole. The study confirms that a compact jet, only visible at radio waves, is altering the shape and increasing the temperature of the surrounding gas, blowing bubbles that expand laterally. These findings

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

From 21th November till 2nd December at the Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos (San Cristóbal de La Laguna), and organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias The 33rd edition of the Winter School of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias will focus on the efforts of astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics to understand the mysteries of the dark universe. The XXXIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, which is taking place between November 21st and December 2nd, was inaugurated yesterday in the Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos, with a welcome address by Rafael Rebolo