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.

List view
  • Reconstruction of the cosmic web (shaded areas in grey in the left panel) based on a distribution of galaxies (in red in the left panel) and the primordial fluctuations (right panel). Credit: Francisco-Shu Kitaura (IAC).
    Press release
    Big Data to model the evolution of the cosmic web
    The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has led an international team which has developed an algorithm called COSMIC BIRTH to analyse large scale cosmic structures. This new computation method will permit the analysis of the evolution of the structure of dark matter from the early universe until the formation of present day galaxies. This work was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
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  • Solar active region artistic simulation
    Press release
    The CLASP2 space experiment achieves an unprecedented map of the Sun’s magnetic field from the photosphere up to the base of the corona
    Every day space telescopes provide spectacular images of the solar activity. However, their instruments are blind to its main driver: the magnetic field in the outer layers of the solar atmosphere, where the explosive events that occasionally affect the Earth occur. The extraordinary observations of the polarization of the Sun’s ultraviolet light achieved by the CLASP2 mission have made it possible to map the magnetic field throughout the entire solar atmosphere, from the photosphere until the base of the extremely hot corona. This investigation, published today in the journal Science
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  • Schematic diagram of the evolution of the Universe from the inflation (left) to the present (right). The “reconstruction method” winds back the evolution from right to left on this illustration to reproduce the primordial density fluctuations from the current galaxy distribution. Credit: Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISN).
    Press release
    Astronomers test a method for investigating cosmic inflation
    A team of astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe applying it to 4,000 simulated universes. To do so they used the ATERUI II supercomputer, at the Japanese observatory and the fastest in the world dedicated to astronomical simulations.
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  • Spectral energy distribution (in white; best theoretical fit in blue) of an extremely red old star. The photometric data from Spitzer's IRAC and MIPS instruments are represented in purple. Credits: Dell'Agli et al. (2021) with background infrared image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, NASA/JPL-Caltech/Meixner(STSCI) and the Sage Legacy Team.
    Research news
    Post-common envelope binaries as the precursors of extremely red old stars
    Modelling dust formation in single stars evolving through the carbon-star stage of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) (i.e., the late evolutionary stages of Sun-like stars) reproduces reasonably well the mid-infrared colours and magnitudes of most of the C-rich sources in low-metallicity galaxies with known distances like the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The only exception to this is a small subset of extremely red objects (EROs). An analysis of the spectral energy distributions of EROs suggests the presence of large quantities of dust, which demand gas densities in the outflow significantly
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  • High-resolution images of the bright boulders (arrows) during Hayabusa2 proximity operations. Especially, the images obtained during the first touchdown operation (a-c) show much smaller bright fragments in regolith everywhere (adapted from Fig.1 in Tatsumi et al. 2021).
    Research news
    Collision of C-type Ryugu’s parent body with a rocky object
    Hayabusa2’s optical navigation camera (ONC) found many anomalously bright boulders on the dark surface of the carbonaceous (or C-type) asteroid Ryugu. Observations with ONC and the near-infrared spectrometer (NIRS3) indicates that at least six of those bright boulders exhibit reflectance spectra consistent with exogenous origin; their spectra are similar to rocky (or S-type) asteroids. This means that the bright boulders resulted from collisional mixing between Ryugu’s parent body and S-type asteroid(s). On Bennu, the asteroid explored by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, bright boulders with spectra
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  • TOI-178
    Press release
    Astronomers discover a surprising system of six exoplanets which orbit rhythmically
    An international collaboration in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias take part, has discovered a unique planetary system made up of six exolplanets, of which five perform an unusual rhythmic dance, while they orbit their star. Even so, the sizes and masses of the planets are not in any ordered pattern. This finding, which is published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophyisics, poses a challenge to current theories of planet formation.
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