The POLMAG research team of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), which includes scientists from other international institutions, has released the public version of PORTA, an advanced radiative transfer code to solve the problem of the generation and transfer of polarized radiation in realistic three-dimensional (3D) models of stellar atmospheres. PORTA allows scientists to plan and model spectropolarimetric observations with today’s telescopes. This public version of PORTA offered to the astrophysical community comes with several modules useful for considering several problems of

An international team led by the group of Cosmology with Galaxy Clusters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), including researchers from the University of Paris-Saclay (France) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany) has finished the optical characterization of new clusters of galaxies in the northern hemisphere, detected first by the Planck satellite using tjhe Suyaev-Zel’dovich signal. These studies allow more accurate determination of the mean matter density in the universe and other cosmological parameters. The observations, which have