An international team of scientists has obtained the first unequivocal detection of a very high speed jet of matter emitted by a galaxy in the process of merging with another. The flux of particles and radiation, which is emitted by the supermassive black hole in the centre of the galaxy and which is observed face on, shows that it is a precursor structure to the formation of a blazar, one of the most energetic objects known. This discovery was made by combining observations from several telescopes, among them the Gran Telescopio Canarias and the William Herschel Telescope at the Roque de

An international research, led by scientists from the University of Sheffield and with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has discovered, using the HiPERCAM instrument of the Gran Telescopio Canarias at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), an ancient pulsating star in a double star system. The discovery, which is published in the journal Nature Astronomy, provides important information about how stars like our Sun evolve and eventually die.

Research led by Artemi Camps, who started it while he was studying for his doctorate in the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna, and is now working at the Instituto de Astronomía of the UNAM (México) has discovered an expanding bubble in the disc of a galaxy. With a diameter of 15,000 light years, it is the largest bubble of its type observed in any galaxy. The study has recently been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A galaxy like the Milky Way is made up of hundreds of thousands of millions of stars, with a mixture

Nature magazine is publishing today a surprising study about the giant, ultra-hot planet WASP-76b in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have taken part. This exoplanet, 390 light years away towards the constellation Pisces, has days when its surface temperatures exceed 2,400 Celsius, sufficiently hot to evaporate metals. Its nights, with strong winds, cool down the iron vapour so that it condenses into drops of iron. This is the first result with the high resolution spectrograph ESPRESSO, an instrument co-directed by the IAC and installed on teh Very Large

An international team of astronomers in the project SPECULOOS, dedicated to the search for habitable planets, with scientists participating from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered an eclipse (termed an occultation) in a peculiar brown dwarf formed by two stars orbiting around each other. The results are just published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The finding was by chance, when the scientists were working on the results from the first light of one of the four telescopes of the project, in Chile. Shortly after the building of the first SECULOOS telescopes, and