An international scientific team, including the researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Cristina Ramos Almeida, Patricia Bessiere and Giovanna Speranza, has discovered that quasars, some of the brightest and most powerful objects in the Universe, are mainly ignited by mergers between galaxies. The finding sheds new light, after years of controversy, on what causes the emission of large amounts of energy in the most powerful active nuclei. The research has used observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de

An international collaboration, with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a system of six exoplanets orbiting a central star with a precise rhythm.This phenomenon, known as orbital resonance, is common during the starting phase of planet formation, but it is exceptional to find a system with such a large set of planets which conserves this kind of gravitational synchronism. This finding shows that the system has not undergone major changes during its six billion year history, so that it gives an unusual view of the formation and evolution of planets. The

Between 27th August and 7th September the Shelios 2023 expedition tool a group of researchers and students at the south of Iceland and Greenland, where they set up two experiments to measure the natural darkness of the arctic night, and from where they broadcast the aurora borealis. Among the apparatus they installed is the autonomous MiNiO (Meteo Nano Observatory) controller, developed by the Technological Institute for Renewable Energies (ITER), for the Interreg EELabs project, coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). As well as making people aware of the problems of