A global team of astronomers and machine learning researchers today announced the release of the " Multimodal Universe" - a groundbreaking 100 terabyte dataset that brings together hundreds of millions of astronomical observations in unprecedented detail and scale. This massive collection of space data aims to revolutionize how artificial intelligence can be applied to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. " The Multimodal Universe makes accessing machine learning-ready astronomical datasets as easy as writing a single line of code," says Helen Qu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Flatiron

ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defense performed a flyby of Mars, as part of its gravitational assistance manoeuvre to shorten its journey to the binary asteroid system Didymos. During the flyby, the spacecraft came around 5000 km from the surface of Mars, having also the opportunity to obtain images of its two moons, Deimos (during the approach) and Phobos (when departing Mars). Julia de León, Javier Licandro, and George Prodan, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, participate in this mission, successfully launched from Cape Cañaveral, Florida (USA) on October 7, 2024

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is hosting during this week the Second SONG Scientific Conference, which brings to an end the first decade of high level studies with this international network designed to study the interiors of the stars and the planetary systems which orbit them.