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.

  • Jorge Martín Camalich (left) and Carlos Hernández Monteagudo (right), researchers at the IAC and the organisers of the present edition of the School, with Rafael Rebolo, Director of the IAC (middle).
    From 21th November till 2nd December at the Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos (San Cristóbal de La Laguna), and organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias The 33rd edition of the Winter School of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias will focus on the efforts of astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics to understand the mysteries of the dark universe. The XXXIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, which is taking place between November 21st and December 2nd, was inaugurated yesterday in the Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos, with a welcome address by Rafael Rebolo
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  • Artist’s impression of an ultra-hot Jupiter transiting its star
    An international team of astronomers, in which IAC researchers participate, have discovered barium, the heaviest element ever found in an exoplanet atmosphere. It has been discovered at high altitudes in the atmosphere of the exoplanets WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b, two ultra-hot gas giants. The unexpected discovery, made possible by the ESPRESSO instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), raises questions about what these exotic atmospheres may look like. WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b are no ordinary exoplanets. Both are referred to as ultra-hot Jupiters as
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  • Sesión Erasmus Plus
    Fifteen students from nine different countries attended a meeting from September 26th to 30th to learn about the measurement of the fundamental properties of stars, how to access the publicly available data used to make these measurements as well as the tools and software involved. The Erasmus+ school "Eclipsing binaries and asteroseismology: Precise fundamental stellar parameters in the golden age of time-domain astronomy" was held in a hybrid format with fifteen students attending in-person and a further fifty via video conference. The latest advances in multi-epoch photometry and
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  • Background is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the relic galaxy, NGC 1277 (Credits: NASA, ESA, M. Beasley, and P. Kehusmaa).  Bottom-left shows the H-band spectrum of the relic galaxy, NGC 1277, obtained with the EMIR spectrograph (middle) at Gran Telescopio Canarias (left) (Credits: pictures of GTC and EMIR are from GTC website).
    Puzzling properties of massive early-type galaxies (ETGs) emerge when studying their spectra at near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths. Massive ETGs show strong CO absorption features in their H and K band spectra that cannot be explained by state-of-the-art stellar population models. For many years, the disagreement has been attributed to the presence of intermediate-age (0.1-2 Gyr) stellar populations in these galaxies, as the NIR light of intermediate-age stellar populations is dominated by cool stars (e.g. asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars) that show strong CO absorptions in their spectrum
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  • Images of the article
    The prestigious journal Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics invites two researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) to publish an article reviewing the most important advances in the study of the magnetic fields in the outer regions of the solar atmosphere. Every year, the editorial committee of the journal Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ARAA) meets to decide which researchers to invite to prepare their reviews, one for each field in Astrophysics. One of the 12 articles of the recently published volume 60 has been written by the IAC researchers
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  • Errant intermediate-mass black holes
    A research team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has observed an unusual type of emission in a sample of local galaxies which could indicate the presence of accretion discs around intermediate mass black holes (IMBH). The discovery would multiply by five the numer of known IMBH and opens a new way to detect and study this mysterious class of astronomica objects. Although only a few are known, via indirect evidence, the IMBH are a key to understand the formation of supermassive black holes and the galaxies which harbour them. The IMBH is a type of black hole whose mass is
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