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.

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  • Scatter plot of oscillation amplitude and damping ratio values for 101 loop oscillation cases. The symbols and their colors indicate the levels of evidence obtained for the nonlinear (NL) and the linear resonant absorption (RA) models.
    Research news
    A nonlinear damping mechanism for waves in the solar corona
    The solar coronal heating problem originated almost 80 years ago and remains unsolved. A plausible explanation lies in mechanisms based on magnetic wave energy dissipation. Currently, several linear and nonlinear wave damping models have been proposed. The advent of space instrumentation has led to the creation of catalogues containing the properties of a large number of loop oscillation events. When the damping ratio of the oscillations is plotted against their oscillation amplitude, the data are scattered forming a cloud with a triangular shape. Larger amplitudes correspond in general to
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  • Artist’s impression of the L 98-59 planetary system. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
    Press release
    A study offers new prospects for finding life outside the Earth
    An international team of astronomers, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has participated, has found an exoplanetary system formed by several planets similar to the inner planets of the Solar System, orbiting around the nearby star L 98-59. Among them there is a planet with half the mass of Venus -the lowest mass exoplanet ever measured using the radial velocity technique-, an oceanic planet, and a planet possibly within the habitable zone.
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  • The image shows the process of nuclear feeding of a black hole in the galaxy NGC 1566, and how the dust filaments, which surround the active nucleus, are trapped and rotate in a spiral around the black hole until it swallows them. Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO).
    Press release
    Astronomers discover how to feed a black hole
    The black holes at the centres of galaxies are the most mysterious objects in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material within them, millions of times the mass of the Sun, but because of the incredibly dense concentration of matter in a volume no bigger than that of our Solar System. When they capture matter from their surroundings they become active, and can send out enormous quantities of energy from the capture process, although it is not easy to detect the black hole during these capture episodes, which are not frequent.
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  • Cosmological simulation of the gas density around a massive galaxy. The activity from the black hole carves bubbles in the surrounding of galaxies, which in turns modulates the evolution of neighboring galaxies.
    Research news
    Black holes modulate star formation in neighboring galaxies
    Every massive galaxy hosts a black hole in its center. Both the size and the mass of these black holes is negligible compared to the host galaxy, millions of times bigger and more massive. Yet, and despite their apparent irrelevance, black holes play a fundamental role in the Universe: without them we don’t understand how galaxies form. Thus, understanding the co-evolution of galaxies and black holes is a central question in modern astrophysics. By analyzing the properties of hundreds of thousands of galaxies we have been able to show that a black hole can affect, not only its own galaxy
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  • Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2.
    Press release
    Rotation found in three galaxies satellites of the Milky Way
    An international team of astrophysicists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI, USA) has discovered the presence of transverse rotation (in the plane of the sky) in three dwarf spheroidal galaxies, a very faint type of galaxies and difficult to observe, which are orbiting round the Milky Way; this helps to trace their evolutionary history. The finding was made using the most recent data from the GAIA satellite of the European Space Agency. The results of the study have just been published in the
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