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.

  • El púlsar PSR J2032+4127 en su momento de máximo acercamiento a la estrella MT91 213, una estrella azul con un disco de materia a su alrededor. Crédito: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
    A joint observational campaign with the MAGIC telescopes at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (Garafía, La Palma) and the VERITAS array at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (Tucson, Arizona), has detected a new source emitting very-high-energy gamma rays from an unusual system consisting of a massive star and a pulsar. The study has just been published in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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  • Galactic composition of NGC 1291 in which its "peanut" structure is shown. Credit:  Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
    Jairo Méndez Abreu and Adriana de Lorenzo-Cáceres, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have discovered a peanut-shaped structure in the inner bar of a double-barred galaxy close to the Milky Way. Structures of this type, previously detected only in outer, or single, bars are useful tracers of the evolution of the galaxies.
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  • Image of asteroid Bennu created using eight images obtained on October 29, 2018 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a distance of 330 km. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona.
    After two years travelling through space, the NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has started to obtain images of the mission target, primitive asteroid Bennu. As part of the Scientific Team of this mission, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Javier Licandro and Julia de León have already started to work in the calibration of this images in preparation for the ones that will be obtained in December 2018 using color filters.
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  • This artist's rendering shows a disk of dust and planetary fragments around a star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. 
    The study, led by Paula Izquierdo, a doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has gone deeply into the analysis of this exceptional white dwarf, which shows periodic transits produced by fragments of a shredded planetesimal. The observations used for this research were obtained with the Gran Telescopio Canarias and with the Liverpool Telescope.
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  • Spectral energy distribution for the nucleus of NGC 1052. Different symbols represent the sub-arcsec and low-angular resolution measurements, interpolation, power-law, hot standard disc, and a Seyfert 2 template.
    Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs) are found in about 1/3 of all the galaxies in the Local Universe, establishing the most numerous class of AGNs. At low accretion rates, LLAGNs are expected to develop major changes in the structure of the accretion disc when compared to their bright counterparts, Seyfert galaxies and Quasars. Here we present high-angular resolution data (~13 pc) for the LLAGN in the nucleus of NGC 1052, covering 10 orders of magnitude in frequency from radio to X-rays. The flux distribution of the nucleus is well described by a broken power law plus an inverse
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  • Kepler's Supernova remnant. Crédito: X-ray: NASA/CXC/NCSU/M.Burkey et al; Optical: DSS. Release date: March 18, 2013.
    A study involving a researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), which has been led by a researcher at the Instituto de Física Fundamental (IFF-CSIC) and the Instituto de Ciencias del Cosmos (UB-IEEC), argues that the explosion that Johannes Kepler observed in 1604 was caused by a merger of two stellar residues.
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