At its Plenary Meeting, the local government (Cabildo) of Tenerife agreed unanimously to confer the Island of Tenerife Gold Medal to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), as well as to Loro Parque zoo and the painter Pedro González González.
A recent study analyses data collected at 44 of the darkest places in the world, including the Canary Island Observatories, to develop the first complete reference method to measure the natural brightness of the night sky using low-cost photometers. Of the 44 photometers in the survey, the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands) stands out at the darkest of all the skies analysed. The night sky is not completely dark; even in the remotest places there is a glow in the sky produced by natural components, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, and by artificial
An international team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has uncovered, with an new high degree of detail, the physical and chemical effects of the impact of a protostellar jet in the interior of the Orion Nebula. The study was made using observations with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and 20 years of images with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The observations show evidence of compression and heating produced by the shock front, and the destruction of dust grains, which cause a dramatic increase in the gas phase abundance of the atoms of iron, nickel
For yet another year the sky-live.tv channel will be broadcasting the maximum of the Perseids from the Canary Observatories, with the collaboration of the Energy Efficiency Laboratories (EELabs) project, coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Innovation Service of the Cabildo Insular of La Palma. This will be during the night of 12th to 13th August, when the best estimates for the activity of the meteors is a rate of 100 per hour. Even though the first records of the Perseids date from 36 A.D., it was not until 1835 that the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet
