News

This section includes scientific and technological news from the IAC and its Observatories, as well as press releases on scientific and technological results, astronomical events, educational projects, outreach activities and institutional events.

  • Poster for the 2024 edition of "Habla con Ellas: Mujeres en Astronomía"
    The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is joining in the celebrations for 11 February by taking part in more than a dozen actions aimed at promoting scientific and technological vocations among girls and young women and making the role of women in the development of science more visible. The report " Radiography of the gender gap in STEAM education" published in 2022 by the Equality Unit of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training shows that in some key disciplines for the future and, in particular, those related to Astronomy and Astrophysics, progress is not being made
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  • Proof-of-concept prototype of DALI experiment
    The annual meeting of the DALI (Dark-photons & Axion-Like particles Interferometer) experiment, an international collaboration to develop an astroparticle detector for the first direct observation of dark matter, was held on 7 and 8 February at the IAC headquarters in La Laguna. The various proofs of concept carried out over the last few years have given rise to a prototype, manufactured at the IAC's instrumentation facilities, whose first scientific results are expected to be published soon. The main goal of DALI is to search for dark matter axions and paraphotons in a spectral range that
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  • The Geminids 2020 meteor shower over the Tejeda Valley (Grand Canary).
    The results obtained from the over two hundred photometers put in place by the Interreg EELabs project during the past four years have been used to evaluated the impact of artificial night lighting on the night-time ecosystems of the achipelagos, especially on sea birds, but also to make the local people aware of this type of contamination. In Macaronesia (the collective name for the Atlantic Islands comprising the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde), natural night-time darkness is preservedonly in highly isolated natural reserves, such as the islands of Corvo and Graciosa (the
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  • For the second year, the Teide Observatory has hosted the "MIT Astronomy Field Camp", a prestigious camp offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), considered one of the best and most influential universities in the world, to its students of of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). Through this experience, the institution provides students with the opportunity to live and work in a professional astronomical observatory while developing real research projects. This work is often expanded into final theses or articles in leading scientific journals. For three weeks
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  • Solar corona in visible light during a solar eclipse
    The POLMAG research group of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has released the public version of P-CORONA, a novel computer program for calculating the intensity and polarization of the light emitted by the million-degree plasma of the solar corona. This plasma diagnostic technique allows scientists to study the magnetic field of the solar corona by comparing their calculations with observations from the most advanced solar telescopes, such as DKIST and Aditya-L1. The solar corona is the outermost region of the solar atmosphere, where the explosive events that can seriously
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  • In the 90s, the COBE satellite discovered that not all the microwave emission from our Galaxy behaved as expected. Part of this signal was later assigned to a fresh new emission component, spatially correlated with the Galactic dust emission, which showed greater importance in the microwave range of frequencies. It has been named since as “anomalous microwave emission”, or AME. The current main hypothesis to explain the AME origin is that it is emitted by small dust particles which undergo fast spinning movements. In Fernández-Torreiro et al. (2023), we study the observational properties of
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