After a break of 4 years, on June 23rd and 24th the Teide Observatory will be celebrating its Open Days. This activity is free; its aim is to bring some knowledge of astronomy to the general public, including those people who happen to be visiting the island on those two days. To make a visit it is essential to register using a special form before June 16th. In this year’s edition the activity will be guided, and 9 points of interest will be visited, one every 20 minutes, so that the complete visit should take 3 hours, from 10:00 to 13:00 for the morning session, and from 16:00 to 19:00 for

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international scientific team, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates, has identified water vapour in the atmosphere of WASP-18 b, a massive extrasolar planet, a so-called hot Jupiter, with a temperature of around 2.700 °C. The result is published in the journal Nature. Exoplanet WASP-18 b is about 400 light-years from Earth, is 10 times more massive than Jupiter and has an orbital period of less than a day. Its extreme proximity to its star, its relative closeness to Earth, and its large mass

The Transient Survey Telescope (TNT) project will install a 1 metre telescope which, in a novel way, will have a wide field of view and will need high capacities of storage and digital processing. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Canary Company Light Bridges, with headquarters in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have recently signe dan agreement which establishes the terms of the cooperation between the two for the installation, setting up, and exploitation of a special telescopic installation called the Transient Survey Telescope (TST) The new telescope will be installed in

An international scientific team, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), have discovered magnetic waves in sunspots with such a high energy flux that they could keep the Sun's atmosphere at millions of degrees. The finding adds a new missing piece to the puzzle of why the Sun's outer layers are hotter than its surface despite being further away from the source of heat. The results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion of hydrogen at the core, where the temperature reaches

An international research, with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet that may be carpeted with volcanoes. Called LP 791-18 d, the planet could undergo volcanic outbursts as often as Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in our solar system. The study is published in the scientific journal Nature. LP 791-18 d orbits a small red dwarf star about 90 light-years away in the southern constellation Crater. The team estimates it’s only slightly larger and more massive than Earth. Astronomers already knew about two