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.

  • CaII Kgrains, i.e., intermittent, short-lived (about 1 minute), periodic (2-4 minutes), pointlike chromospheric brightenings, are considered to be the manifestations of acoustic waves propagating upward from the solar surface and developing into shocks in the chromosphere. After the simulations of Carlsson and Stein, we know that hot shocked gas moving upward interacting with the downflowing chromospheric gas (falling down after having been displaced upward by a previous shock) nicely reproduces the spectral features of the CaII K profiles observed in such grains, i.e., a narrowband emission

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  • Villa de La Orotava Science Fair Awards

    Yesterday, in the Noble Hall of the Town Hall of the municipality of La Orotava (Tenerife), took place the award ceremony of the Villa de La Orotava Science Fair Awards, a recognition to people and institutions that are committed to outreach and scientific research. In this first edition, the award in the outreach category went to the journalist and writer Carmen del Puerto, who has been in charge of communications at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) for more than three decades. She was joined by the parasitologist Basilio Valladares (Research Award) and the physicist and

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  • Julissa Reynoso, embajadora de Estados Unidos, durante su visita al IAC

    Julissa Reynoso, US Ambassador to Spain, together with other members of her team, visited yesterday the headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, accompanied by Rafael Rebolo, Director of the IAC. During their tour of the facilities, they were briefed on the various research programmes and technology projects under development. They also received a dossier on all the ongoing collaborations with US research centres and possible projects still under negotiation, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

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  • JWST SMACS0723 galaxies

    The cosmic evolution of the barred galaxy population provides key information about the secular evolution of galaxies and the settling of rotationally dominated discs. We study the bar fraction in the SMACSJ0723.37323 (SMACS0723) cluster of galaxies at z = 0.39 using the Early Release Observations obtained with the NIRCam instrument mounted on the JWST telescope. We visually inspected all cluster member galaxies using the images from the NIRCam F200W filter. We classified the galaxies into ellipticals and discs and determine the presence of a bar. The cluster member selection was based on a

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  • Cartel de la charla. Crédito: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA3.0 IGO

    Tomorow, 10th November, at 18:00 the Museum of Science and the Cosmos will offer, free, a lectura with the title “The Milky Way and its encounters with other galaxies. It will be given in Spanish by Teresa Antoja, an astrophysicist and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institute of Science of the Cosmos in the University of Barcelona (ICCUB). The field of encounters between galaxies has been growing in importance in recent years. The European Space Agency (ESA), launched the Gaia mission some years ago, and this has provided a large amount of new information in the form of data which have

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  • Artist's impression of the evolution of the galaxy ceers-2112

    An international team of scientists, with participation by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) have found a barred spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, in the early universe, when it was only 15% as old as it is now. The galaxy, ceers-2112, is the most distant barred spiral observed, and its existence poses a challege to the current model of formation and evolution of galaxies. The discovery, made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is published in the journal Nature. In astrophysics studying the structure of galaxies

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