An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has observed a dramatic change in a supermassive black hole. Located about 10 billion light-years away, the object dimmed to roughly one-twentieth of its former brightness in just two decades — an extraordinarily short interval on cosmic timescales. The discovery was made within a collaborative observing framework linking Japan’s Subaru Telescope with the GTC in Spain’s Canary Islands at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in La Palma

A team of cosmologists from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) has obtained the most accurate census to date of the dark matter halos of the Universe. The work is based on the development of a new model, called GPS+, capable of predicting how many dark matter halos exist at each stage of cosmic history. In the universe, there are enormous invisible structures surrounding galaxies and galaxy clusters. These are dark matter halos, concentrations of matter that do not emit light and cannot be directly observed, but