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.

  • IAUS
    The symposium of the International Astronomical Union will be held between 2 and 6 October at the Teatro Circo de Marte in the capital of La Palma. There will be several events open to the public: a talk by Piero Benvenuti entitled "Protecting the sky is our duty... but what have I got to do with the Big-bang?", on Monday 2nd October at 19.30 in the Circo de Marte itself; and on Thursday 5th October, the "Starparty", with the symbolic switching off of some of the city's squares and a musical performance in the Museo Insular de La Palma. After having to be suspended on two occasions, once due
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  • Closing of the Research Infrastructures Conference
    A total of 14 countries have so far signed up to the Spanish Presidency Declaration of Tenerife, an initiative promoted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation within the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, which was presented during the "Global Dimension and Sustainability of Research Infrastructures" Conference. This event took place on 25 and 26 September at the IACTEC building managed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the Science and Technology Park of Tenerife (La Laguna). Other highlights of the Declaration include the
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  • The attendees at the Research Infrastructures Conference visiting the OT
    From 25th to 29th September the Ministry of Science and Innovation, in the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), is organizing and participating in a number of events related to research, development and innovation in national and European infrastructures, which are taking place in Tenerife. The aim is to bring together the main protagonists in the sector of research infrastructures (the politicians responsible, organizations, user instituttions etc.) to facilitate cooperation and mutual
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  • The amount and complexity of data delivered by modern galaxy surveys has been steadily increasing over the past years. New facilities will soon provide imaging and spectra of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Extracting coherent scientific information from these large and multi-modal data sets remains an open issue for the community and data-driven approaches such as deep learning have rapidly emerged as a potentially powerful solution to some long lasting challenges. This enthusiasm is reflected in an unprecedented exponential growth of publications using neural networks, which have gone
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  • Galaxia de Maisie
    An international study, carried out by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has participated, shows that the universe could produce extremely luminous galaxies at very early epochs, when it was only some 3% of its present age. This result implies that these galaxies formed stars before, and more quickly than predicted by current theoretical models. The study also reveals an unusual galaxy that “imitates” the emission from a very distant galaxy. The results are published in the journal Nature. During the first months of scientific
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  • INT and 2023 DZ2
    An international scientific team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate, confirms that the asteroid, discovered with the Isaac Newton telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), follows an orbit synchronised with that of Jupiter, which reduces the probability of a collision with our planet in the coming decades. The celestial body is very solid, metallic, rotates ten times every hour and is about 40 metres long. The study is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Asteroid 2023 DZ2, detected in February with the
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