The course, taught by Hannah Thiel, a researcher at the Vigo Quantum Communication Center, brought Institute staff together around the foundations, applications and technological challenges of quantum communications and quantum key distribution. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) held a specialised course on quantum communications on 28 and 29 July, organised at the invitation of the Free Space Optics Communications Lab of the CELESTE project. The training, delivered by researcher Hannah Thiel, from the Vigo Quantum Communication Center at the Universidad de Vigo, took place at

A team of cosmologists from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) has obtained the most accurate census to date of the dark matter halos of the Universe. The work is based on the development of a new model, called GPS+, capable of predicting how many dark matter halos exist at each stage of cosmic history. In the universe, there are enormous invisible structures surrounding galaxies and galaxy clusters. These are dark matter halos, concentrations of matter that do not emit light and cannot be directly observed, but

A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics unveils a powerful way to determine the size of dark matter haloes—the massive, invisible structures that host galaxies—by simply measuring how large galaxies appear in deep astronomical images. Researchers Ignacio Trujillo and Claudio Dalla Vecchia, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), demonstrate that galaxy size can serve as a precise proxy for halo size, offering measurements up to six times more accurate than previous methods. Using the cutting-edge EAGLE cosmological simulations