By virtue of this agreement, signed today at ESA’s European Centre of Space Research and Technology (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, (The Netherlands), Tenerife will become the main European Centre of Space Communications by laser.

A visit to the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory with the students of the Santo Domingo secondary school, and a public lecture about the new generation of cherenkov telescopes which will study the most energetic phenomena in the universe from this municipality in La Palma, are among the activities to be carried out on May 16th.

The OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) has discovered, on the spiral galaxy Messier 106, a system of globular clusters whose unusual distribution and motion, wich could be a relic from the the “cosmic noon”.

Last Monday the GTC observed the asteroid 2019 DS1 in the context of a collaborative programme between the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) in which researchers from the Solar System group at the IAC are participating.

200 nights of observation were needed, from both northern and southern hemispheres, to complete the biggest panorama of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. This IAC project, funded by the FECYT, has obtained the biggest panoramic image ever taken of our Galaxy without the use of professional telescopes.

An international study, using the high-speed HiPERCAM camera, installed in the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has determined for the first time the mass and radius of one of the oldest stars in our Galaxy.