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.

  • Young Exoplanet
    Researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with other entities, such as NASA , have managed to detect the youngest planet ever found, using the technique of transits. This “baby planet” is paradoxically a giant in orbit round a very young star. The Principal Investigator of this finding, which has been published in the Journal Nature , is Madyson Barber, of the University of North Caroliona at Chapel Hill . Other authors of the article include Felipe Murgas and Enric Palle of the IAC. The discovery was made using the technique of transits. This works
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  • DESI observes the sky from the Mayall Telescope, shown here during the 2023 Geminid meteor shower.  Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Sparks
    Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has traced how this cosmic structure grew over the past 11 billion years, providing the most precise test to date of gravity at very large scales. DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers, included the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by
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  • alpha_plot_density_gamma_b
    The universality of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is one of the most widespread assumptions in modern Astronomy and yet, it might be flawed. While observations in the Milky Way generally support an IMF that is invariant with respect to the local conditions under which stars form, measurements of massive early-type galaxies systematically point towards a non-universal IMF. To bridge the gap between both sets of evidence, in this work we measured for the first time the low-mass end of the IMF from the integrated spectra of a Milky Way-like galaxy, NGC3351. We found that the slope of
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  • First Meeting of New IAC and CTAO Directors Marks Next Phase of Collaboration
    This week, CTAO Managing Director, Stuart McMuldroch, and Construction Programme Manager, Volker Heinz, traveled to the Canary Islands for a productive visit with the hosting partners at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and colleagues from the CTAO Large-Sized Telescope (LST) Collaboration. The team was warmly welcomed at the IAC Headquarters in Tenerife by IAC Director, Valentín Martínez, marking the first official meeting between the two directors since Valentín recently assumed this role. Hosted by Ramón García López, Principal Investigator of the CTAO group at the IAC, the
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  • Recreation of the PLATO mission in Space / ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA)
    The Instrument division of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has been working, in collaboration with other organizations, on the design and manufacture of the electronic system which will receive and process the astronomical data from the PLATO space mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) which aim is find “other Earths” which orbit stars similar to the Sun. The work led by the IAC has recently been approved by an international technical team which met at the headquarters of the company CRISA/AIRBUS in Madrid, with the presence of representatives of the European Space Agency
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  • Dispositivo PINRELL para el estudio del pie diabético /Inés Bonet
    Con motivo del Día Mundial de la Diabetes el 14 de noviembre, el IAC anuncia el lanzamiento del nuevo programa de ampliación de la Base de Datos con la que cuenta el equipo de investigación. Los nuevos datos contribuirán al avance en el diagnóstico precoz de patologías del pie diabético. Las personas que quieran colaborar, pueden pedir cita a partir del día 19, rellenando un formulario en la página web del IAC.
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