News

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.

  • Black hole of Andromeda

    A team of scientists led by the Observatory of Munich University and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias have obtained direct visualization of the process of feeding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Andromeda galaxy. The study reveals the existence of long filamentary structures of gas and dust which move in a spiral starting at a distance from the black hole and ending up at the black hole itself. The results, which have been published in the Astrophysical Journal, were obtained using images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. The Andromeda Galaxy, which is

    Advertised on
  • Image of the Nube galaxy through different telescopes. Credit: SDSS/GTC/IAC

    A group of astrophysicists led by Mireia Montes, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered the largest and most diffuse galaxy recorded until now. The study has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and has used data taken with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Green Bank Radiotelescope (GBT). Nube is an almost invisible dwarf galaxy discovered by an international research team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions. The name was

    Advertised on
  • Corriente gigante de Coma

    An international team of scientists, with participation by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a very large, but thin, stream of stars in the Coma cluster of galaxies. This is the largest stream of stars detected until now, and the first to be found in a cluster of galaxies. This finding, which is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was made using observations taken with the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The Coma Cluster is a large cluster of galaxies

    Advertised on
  • Cadena de resonancias del sistema HD110067

    An international collaboration, with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a system of six exoplanets orbiting a central star with a precise rhythm.This phenomenon, known as orbital resonance, is common during the starting phase of planet formation, but it is exceptional to find a system with such a large set of planets which conserves this kind of gravitational synchronism. This finding shows that the system has not undergone major changes during its six billion year history, so that it gives an unusual view of the formation and evolution of planets. The

    Advertised on
  • Artist's impression of a protocluster of galaxies in the early Universe

    An international research team, led from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) together with a group of Italian universities, has confirmed a new method for finding protoclusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the early universe. These progenitors of present-day clusters of galaxies played an essential role in the evolution of the universe, but are not easy to find. This study shows that a specific type of galaxies, those which emit radiation at submillimetre wavelengths, are very good indicators of the presence of distant protoclusters

    Advertised on
  • CaII Kgrains, i.e., intermittent, short-lived (about 1 minute), periodic (2-4 minutes), pointlike chromospheric brightenings, are considered to be the manifestations of acoustic waves propagating upward from the solar surface and developing into shocks in the chromosphere. After the simulations of Carlsson and Stein, we know that hot shocked gas moving upward interacting with the downflowing chromospheric gas (falling down after having been displaced upward by a previous shock) nicely reproduces the spectral features of the CaII K profiles observed in such grains, i.e., a narrowband emission

    Advertised on