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 attendees at the Research Infrastructures Conference visiting the OT
    From 25th to 29th September the Ministry of Science and Innovation, in the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), is organizing and participating in a number of events related to research, development and innovation in national and European infrastructures, which are taking place in Tenerife. The aim is to bring together the main protagonists in the sector of research infrastructures (the politicians responsible, organizations, user instituttions etc.) to facilitate cooperation and mutual
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  • The amount and complexity of data delivered by modern galaxy surveys has been steadily increasing over the past years. New facilities will soon provide imaging and spectra of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Extracting coherent scientific information from these large and multi-modal data sets remains an open issue for the community and data-driven approaches such as deep learning have rapidly emerged as a potentially powerful solution to some long lasting challenges. This enthusiasm is reflected in an unprecedented exponential growth of publications using neural networks, which have gone
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  • Galaxia de Maisie
    An international study, carried out by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has participated, shows that the universe could produce extremely luminous galaxies at very early epochs, when it was only some 3% of its present age. This result implies that these galaxies formed stars before, and more quickly than predicted by current theoretical models. The study also reveals an unusual galaxy that “imitates” the emission from a very distant galaxy. The results are published in the journal Nature. During the first months of scientific
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  • INT and 2023 DZ2
    An international scientific team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate, confirms that the asteroid, discovered with the Isaac Newton telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), follows an orbit synchronised with that of Jupiter, which reduces the probability of a collision with our planet in the coming decades. The celestial body is very solid, metallic, rotates ten times every hour and is about 40 metres long. The study is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Asteroid 2023 DZ2, detected in February with the
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  • Comparison between GJ 1002 and Sistema Solar
    Red dwarfs are the most common stars in the galaxy. In recent years they have become key targets in the search for exoplanets. These stars are usually accompanied by rocky planets and due to their low brightness, their habitable zone is close to the star, making it easier to find planets that are within it. GJ 1002 is a red dwarf just one-eighth the mass of the Sun, located only 15.8 light-years away. Using radial velocity measurements from the ESPRESSO and CARMENES spectrographs, we have discovered the presence of two Earth-like and potentially habitable planets. The planets, GJ 1002 b and
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  • Toi-1853 b
    An international team of researchers, with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has discovered an extremely dense Neptune-sized planet, which challenges the conventional theories about the formation and evolution of planets. It was first identified with NASA’s TESS satellite, and the present studies were made with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The results of the study have been published in the journal Nature. It is called TOI-1853b and is really
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