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.

  • 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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  • Fernando Clavijo, Diana Morant y Rafael Rebolo

    La ministra de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Diana Morant, ha presidido esta mañana la reunión anual del Consejo Rector del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) en la Sede del IAC, en La Laguna, en la que ha anunciado que el físico solar Valentín Martínez Pillet será el próximo director de este organismo público de investigación. Los miembros del Consejo han agradecido a Rafael Rebolo la labor desarrollada durante sus 10 años al frente de la institución y han destacado su categoría profesional y su labor de gestión. Además de la ministra, a esta reunión también han asistido

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  • Distant galaxies identified by JWST

    Thanks to images obtained by the James Webb Telescope (JWST), an international scientific team in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates has been able to verify that galaxies in the early universe are usually flat and elongated, and not round or spiral like the nearest galaxies. International research has found, by analysing high-resolution, infrared images of the JWST, that flattened oval disc and tube-shaped galaxies were much more common when the universe was between 600 million and 6 billion years old. In contrast, the nearest galaxies have clearly defined

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