Massive stars in metal-poor galaxies often have close partners, just like the massive stars in our metal-rich Milky Way. This has been discovered by an international scientific team in which research staff from the Instituto de Aastrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) participate. They used the European Very Large Telescope in Chile to monitor the velocity of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The research is published in Nature Astronomy . For the past twenty years, astronomers have known that many massive stars in the metal-rich Milky Way have a

As part of Open Government Week, which is being held from 19 to 25 May, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has organised open days at its facilities in La Laguna (Tenerife) to bring its research and technological activity closer to the public. This international initiative aims to promote the values of transparency, citizen participation and accountability in public administrations. The visits, in which dozens of people took part in different shifts, were held on Monday 19 May at the IAC headquarters and on Tuesday 20 May at the IACTEC building, the Institute's technological and

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