A recent study led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has resolved an old debate about the progenitor stars of the brightest planetary nebulae. The first author of this article, which has just been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is Rebeca Galera Rosillo, a doctoral student at the IAC who passed away in 2020 when she was finishing this work for her doctoral thesis. The first and most important datum needed to grasp the nature of the universe is to know its size, to measure the distance to the galaxies. Just as in the Renaissance people began

The Unit of Communication and Scientific Culture (UC3) of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the Museum of Science and the Cosmos (Museums of Tenerife) has edited an astronomical wall calendar, with astronomical ephemerides for the year 2022, which can be consulted and downloaded in digital form and can be obtained in physical form at the IAC Headquarters in La Laguna. The 12 astronomical images which illustrate it have been obtained by astrophotographer Daniel López (The Canary Sky) and the astrophysicists Alfred Rosenberg (IAC), Oswaldo González (MCC

An international study, with the participation of researchers from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan) affiliated to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a first-of-its-kind exploding star, thought to have existed only in theory. The findings are being published today in Nature. In the not-so-distant past, the discovery of a supernova – an exploding star – was considered a rare occasion. Today, advanced measuring instruments and analysis methods make it possible to detect fifty such explosions on a daily basis, which has also increased the probability

Just as archaeology examines the ground with great care to find valuable objects which helps us to get to know ancient civilizations, astronomers look at the stars in the Milky Way in the hope of finding clues to help us understand the earliest period of development of our Galaxy. A team of researchers, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias participates, publishes today in Nature the discovery of the oldest globular cluster remnant discovered to date. This study combines data from ESA's GAIA satellite with observations made at the Gran Telescopio Canarias, installed at the Roque