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.

List view
  • (Left) Location of target PNe on an image of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). (Right) Hertzsprung-Russell diagram showing the location of PNe central stars and the theoretical model tracks. The final and corresponding initial masses are indicated on the tracks. Note the remarkable clustering of the brightest PNe central stars (green squares) on the 1.5 Msun track.
    Research news
    Solving the enigma of the brightest planetary nebulae
    Planetary nebulae (PNe) are the ejecta of evolved low-intermediate mass stars present in all stellar systems. Perhaps the easiest thing to do when studying PNe in a galaxy is just counting how many of them appear with a given luminosity, the Planetary Nebula Luminosity Function (PNLF). Not surprisingly, just a few very bright, and many more fainter, PNe populate the PNLF. But, most surprisingly, the bright end bin of the PNLF has a remarkably constant cut-off value in all galaxies and stellar systems studied so far, both young and old, with just a mild, calibrateable dependence on
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  • Poster of the talk "Formation and evolution of the large scale structures of our Universe: the clusters of galaxies"
    Press release
    Public lecture: “Formation and evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe: clusters of galaxies”
    Tomorrow, Friday 26th November at 18.00 in the Museum of Science and the Cosmos of Museums of Tenerife there will be an outreach talk “Formation and evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe; clusters of galaxies” by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) José Alberto Rubiño Martín. The lecture, organized in the framework of the XXXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics , will be public and will be in Spanish. After a year without being held due to COVID-19, from 23 November to 1 December, the IAC Winter School returns to Tenerife, attended by
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  • Opening of Winter School 2021
    Press release
    Clusters of galaxies: features of the XXXII IAC Winter School
    Today in the multiple use hall of IACTEC in La Laguna the XXXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), was inaugurated. In this edition, which will take place between 23rd November and 1st December, 55 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from more than 15 countries will participate with their presence at a variety of lectures, practical sessions and seminars by world-leading experts . This year, due mainly to the difficulty of travelling from some countries, 10 extra students
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  • Top: final transmission spectrum and retrieved models for HAT-P-65b. The white circles refer to the data. The blue line and shading show the results from the full retrieval, while the red line and shading from the K-muted retrieval. Bottom: retrieved temperature-pressure (T-P) profiles and mass fractions for the full retrieval (left two) and K-muted retrieval (right two), respectively.
    Research news
    Detection of TiO and Na in the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter HAT-P-65b
    We present the low-resolution transmission spectra of the puffy hot Jupiter HAT-P-65b (0.53 MJup, 1.89 RJup, Teq = 1930 K), based on two transits observed using the OSIRIS spectrograph on the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS. The transmission spectra of the two nights are consistent, covering the wavelength range 517–938 nm and consisting of mostly 5 nm spectral bins. We perform equilibrium-chemistry spectral retrieval analyses on the jointly fitted transmission spectrum and obtain an equilibrium temperature of 1645 (-244+255) K and a cloud coverage of 36 (-17+23) %, revealing a relatively
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  • Photometric magnetic activity index, Sph, as a function of the Rossby for the Kepler stars showing the comparison between an older relation to compute the Rossby number (left panel, Noyes 1984) and the Rossby number from this work (right panel).
    Research news
    Calibrating the Rossby number, a key parameter to study the magnetic activity of stars
    In a star like the Sun, surface magnetic activity results from the interaction between rotation, convection, and magnetic field. One of the key parameters to study the magnetic activity of stars is the Rossby number, which is the ratio between the surface rotation period of the star and the convective turnover time. The convective turnover time measures the time that takes a bubble of plasma to go from the base of the convective zone in a star like the Sun to the surface, similarly to a bubble reaching the surface in a pan with boiling water heated by the bottom. While the surface rotation
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  • View of HH204, a Herbig-Haro object in the Orion Nebula. The left panel shows the Orion Nebula observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, picking out the area around HH204. In the right panel, we can see in detail the structure of HH204 and of its apparent companion, HH203. In this panel, the images by the Hubble Space Telescope taken during 20 years and artificially highlighted with different colours show the advance of the jets of gas through the Orion Nebula. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Press release
    Anatomy of the impact of a protostellar jet in the Orion Nebula
    An international team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has uncovered, with an new high degree of detail, the physical and chemical effects of the impact of a protostellar jet in the interior of the Orion Nebula. The study was made using observations with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and 20 years of images with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The observations show evidence of compression and heating produced by the shock front, and the destruction of dust grains, which cause a dramatic increase in the gas phase abundance of the atoms of iron, nickel
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