An international scientific team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) found a neutron star that captures matter from a companion star with a violent and unstable process. This mechanism, previously observed only in very bright systems with black holes, shows that the so-called “accretion instability” is actually a fundamental physical process. Moreover, this discovery opens a new general scenario that explains the extreme accretion of matter on compact objects. The study is published in the journal Nature. X-ray binaries are systems formed by a compact object, a neutron star

The Open Adminnistration Week aims at bringing Public Administration closer to the general public based on the principle of Open Gevernment. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias is participating in this edition by offering a number of visits to the La Palma Supercomputing Node between Martch 20th and 22nd. Those interested can inscribe via email. This is an initiative on world wide scale, promoted by the Aliance for Open Government ( Open Gov Week ) which will be celebrated in Spain in 2023 from March 20th to 24th. During this week the Spanish Public Administration and the organizations

20,000 observations from the Calar Alto telescope in Spain are made public, and have led to the discovery of 59 planets, some of them potentially habitable. The study, led by a consortium of Spanish and German institutions, has the prominent participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and it is is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The CARMENES project has just pub lished data from about 20,000 observations taken between 2016 and 2020 for a sample of 362 nearby cool stars. The project, which is financed with Spanish and German funds, uses the CARMENES

In January the Teide Observatory was host, for the first time, to the “MIT Astronomy Field Camp”. This is a historic camp which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers to its students of planetary sciences and observational astronomy with the aim of giving them real life experience of working in a professional observatory. For three weeks the students of this prestigious institution had access to several telescopes at the Teide Observatory, with which they could take astronomical data for their research projects. At the end of their stay, in the Headquarters of the IAC in La

Scientists have discovered a new ring system around a dwarf planet on the edge of the Solar System. The ring system orbits much further out than is typical for other ring systems, calling into question current theories of how ring systems are formed. The discovery, published in Nature, was made possible thanks to the HiPERCAM instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma. A system of rings has been discovered around the dwarf planet Quaoar which is approximately half the size of Pluto and orbits the Sun beyond Neptune. The discovery