The Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), via the Spanish Virtual Observatory, is offering the scientific community and the general public a catalogue of more than 600,000 astronomical sources observed by the OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias.

A international team of astronomers, led by the University of Southampton and with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has used the camera HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias and NASA’s NICER space observatory to make a high frame-rate movie of a growing black hole system. In the process they have discoverd violent flares in visible light and in X-rays which give new clues to help understand the immediate surroundings of these intriguing objects. The results of this study are published in the prestigious journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

The two spectrographs on the Gran Telescopio Canarias have reached their full operating level and have become two of the most requested instruments for observing time on this major telescope which has produced over 500 publications in high level journals and has accumulated over 10,000 citations.

The Universities of Turku (UTU) and Aarhus (AU) are the new owners of the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) situated in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM). The two institutions take over from the Nordic Optical Telescope Scientific Associations (NOTSA), a non-profit organization created in 1984 by the Reseearch Councils of Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, with the later incorporation of Iceland, in 1997. On 1 October, a delegation from both universities took part in a simple event at the ORM, which was also attended by representatives of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

The spectrum acquired by GTC of interstellar comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) reveals that this object has a surface composition not unlike that found in Solar System comets. Shortly before dawn on September 13th, Julia de León, Miquel Serra-Ricart, Javier Licandro, all members of IAC's Solar System Group, and Carlos Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, from the Complutense University of Madrid, obtained high resolution images and visible spectra of comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) using the OSIRIS instrument at the 10.4m GTC, installed in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma). Observations were

An international team of astronomers, including researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the CSIC has found evidence of a “kilonomva” in the data from a gamma ray burst detected in August 2016. This is a phenomenon similar to the supernovae which produce large quantities of heavy elements, such as gold and platinum. This event is similar to another explosion detected by LIGO in 2017, for which the combined observation of light and gravitational waves opened the door to an understanding of this type of objects. The results are to be published in the journal Monthly