An international scientific team, including the researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Cristina Ramos Almeida, Patricia Bessiere and Giovanna Speranza, has discovered that quasars, some of the brightest and most powerful objects in the Universe, are mainly ignited by mergers between galaxies. The finding sheds new light, after years of controversy, on what causes the emission of large amounts of energy in the most powerful active nuclei. The research has used observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de

A group of astrophysicists led by Mireia Montes, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered the largest and most diffuse galaxy recorded until now. The study has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and has used data taken with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Green Bank Radiotelescope (GBT). Nube is an almost invisible dwarf galaxy discovered by an international research team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions. The name was