An international team, led by a pre-doctoral researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has revealed that the heaviest chemical elements on the surfaces of the youngest massive stars originate from their more evolved companions. The study has been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics . ‘Throughout their lives, stars produce energy by fusing lighter chemical elements into heavier ones.’ “Stars are the universe’s great factories for chemical elements: as they evolve, they take the lighter ones and fuse them into heavier ones, changing their original

The illustrated publication “SUPERNOVAE. How stellar deaths shape our universe” explores stellar explosions and their connection to the elements that make life possible, neutrinos and some of the cosmos’s greatest mysteries. How do stars die? What remains after a supernova? How are these explosions connected to the matter we are made of? UNDARK, a project funded by the European Union through the WIDERA programme under Horizon Europe and coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), brings these questions to the public through SUPERNOVAE , an illustrated publication whose

On the occasion of International Dark Matter Day, the IAC transversal project “Dark matter: observations, models and detection” — coordinated by G. Battaglia — celebrated its first internal workshop on October 29th at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), with the support of the DiaLoGues project. The IAC transversal project “Dark matter: observations, models and detection”, created in 2026, brings together IAC researchers with complementary expertise united by a common goal: understanding the fundamental nature of dark matter (DM), one of the main constituents of the Universe