A new international study, using observations from the Gran Telescopio Canarias at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, has identified a plasma bubble as the source of the persistent emission observed in some of the so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs), one of the most powerful and unknown cosmic events in the Universe. The data also allow researchers to constrain the nature of the “engine” powering these mysterious sources. The results are published today in Nature. Discovered just over a decade ago, fast radio bursts (FRBs) emit millisecond-long pulses that release an immense

An international scientific team, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates, has discovered the extremely eccentric orbit of a gas giant exoplanet. This world, called TIC 241249530 b, not only follows one of the most drastically stretched-out orbits of all known transiting exoplanets, but also is also orbiting its star backwards, lending insight into the mystery of how these high-mass gas giants evolve into hot Jupiters , with very close and circular trajectories. The study is published in Nature. Within the population of known exoplanets, there are those that

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