The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile, today released its first images of the universe, known in astronomy as an instrument's “first light”. This event marks the beginning of a project that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe over the next decade. Jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating, as part of a consortium of Spanish institutions, in its scientific exploitation and contributing observation time from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or

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

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