Hoy se inauguró la XXIX Escuela de Invierno que, como cada año, organiza el Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). Por este motivo, entrevistamos a Artemio Herrero, catedrático de la Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) e investigador del IAC, especializado en las atmósferas de las estrellas masivas, que hablará sobre los Fundamentos Físicos del Transporte Radiativo. En sus charlas introducirá algunos conceptos básicos sobre la interacción entre radiación y materia que serán desarrollados por el resto de profesores a lo largo de la semana. "El transporte radiativo es fundamental en

Life, as we know it, exists only on Earth. The emergence of life here may be a matter of probability or luck, but in Science there is no place for the second. Evidence is needed and, for this reason, there are researchers like Malcolm Fridlund, an expert on Astrobiology and Exoplanets, bent on finding other earths that can host some form of life, however simple it may be. Professor at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and Affiliated Professor at the Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg (Sweden), he has been involved in instrumental development and space missions of ESA and NASA

“The stellar population group at IAC has developed state-of-the-art population synthesis tools for retrieving the Stellar Formation History of resolved stellar systems” “We still lack of a clear understanding of how globular clusters formed and what was the sequence of events that leaded to the formation of distinct stellar sub-populations” “The discovery of multiple stellar populations in Galactic Globular Clusters (GGCs) is one of the most important discovery of Astrophysics of last decade” By Elena Mora (IAC) Is it possible to know how stars formed billions of years ago? Santi Cassisi, a

“With TIMER we could demonstrate a very beautiful idea: If we measure the ages of the stars that were born in the bar via the secular evolution processes, we can estimate when the galactic disc settled into a dynamically mature state” “In order to understand well how galaxies came to be the way we observe them today we must understand well the effects driven by bars” “With the TIMER demonstration programme we have already shown for one galaxy that secular evolution started 10 billion years ago, and that the structure thus formed is actually old” By Elena Mora (IAC) On nights which are

Giuseppe Bono, astrophysicist and associate professor of the Department of Physics at the Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata" (Italy), is currently Chair of the E-ELT Project Science Team, the future 39m European Extremely Large Telescope, intended to be the largest optical-infrared telescope in the world. Interested in the evolution of stars, pulsations and stellar populations, as well as cosmological parameters based on these objects, he has visited the IAC several times, both as a researcher and professor at the Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics that has been annually

Black holes, those "cosmic ghosts" on which literature and cinema have based many of their stories, were no longer so mysterious when Phil Charles, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), found in 1992, along with the IAC researcher Jorge Casares, the first empirical evidence of their existence in the Milky Way. From that moment, everything changed in the field of High Energy Astrophysics. Even today, he continues to investigate these binary systems, although he is also interested in all cosmic objects that are X-ray sources. Linked to the Instituto de