The international collaboration Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT), in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate, has discovered rapid and quasi-periodic variations in the observed brightness of the blazar BL Lacertae, located about a billion light-years away. These changes were observed during a strong outburst in 2020 and their origin is associated with a jet of high-energy particles. The study has used data from space satellites combined with observations from ground-based infrastructures, including the Teide Observatory (OT) and the Roque de los

A research team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has observed an unusual type of emission in a sample of local galaxies which could indicate the presence of accretion discs around intermediate mass black holes (IMBH). The discovery would multiply by five the numer of known IMBH and opens a new way to detect and study this mysterious class of astronomica objects. Although only a few are known, via indirect evidence, the IMBH are a key to understand the formation of supermassive black holes and the galaxies which harbour them. The IMBH is a type of black hole whose mass is

A study, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the presence of an unusual metal-poor brown dwarf less than 30 light-years away from the Sun. Its proximity could suggest a possible overabundance of brown dwarfs formed in the early stages of the Milky Way. Several telescopes located at the observatories of Roque de Los Muchachos (La Palma) and Calar Alto (Almería) have been used in the investigation. The results are published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. On a cosmic scale, our immediate neighbourhood is composed of just a few hundred stars and brown