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.

  • GJ 367 b
    An international team, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered an extrasolar planet with half the mass of the Earth that takes approximately eight hours to orbit its parent star, a red dwarf just under 31 light-years from Earth. Called GJ 367 b, it is one of the lightest among the nearly 5.000 exoplanets known today. With a diameter of just over 9000 kilometres, this sub-Earth is slightly larger than Mars. The discovery not only demonstrates that it is possible to precisely determine the event the smallest, least massive exoplanets, but also
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  • V1298 Tau
    An international team of scientists, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate together with other institutions from Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, UK, and Mexico, has been able to measure the masses of the giant planets of the V1298 Tau system, just 20 million year old. Masses for such young giant planets had not been obtained previously, and this is the first evidence that these objects have already reached their final size at very early stages of their evolution. For this study they have used radial velocity measurements from the HARPS-N
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  • Grupo Winter
    65 doctoral students and postgraduate researchers from 15 different countries participated, for 9 days, in the XXXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, which this year was focused on clusters of galaxies, the largest gravitationally bound structures that we can observe in the Universe. Of the full complement of students, 55 were present at the school, while the other 10 followed the course on internet. As well as being one fo the first astrophysics meetings celebrated internationally with students present, this edition of the IAC Winter School was noteworthy for the highest
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  • (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.
    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"
    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
    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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