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.

  • Relación entre la SFR media para las galaxias con y sin AGN
    Recent observational studies suggest that feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGNs)—the energetic centres powered by supermassive black holes—may play an important role in the formation and evolution of dwarf galaxies, contrary to the standard thought. We investigated this using two sets of 12 cosmological magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the formation of dwarf galaxies: one set using a version of the AURIGA galaxy formation physics model including AGN feedback and a parallel set with AGN feedback turned off. Our results reveal that AGNs can suppress the star formation (SF) of dwarf
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  • DESI observes the sky from the Mayall Telescope, shown here during the 2023 Geminid meteor shower.  Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Sparks
    Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has traced how this cosmic structure grew over the past 11 billion years, providing the most precise test to date of gravity at very large scales. DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers, included the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by
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  • MaNGA galaxies
    The hierarchical model of galaxy evolution suggests that mergers have a substantial impact on the intricate processes that drive stellar assembly within a galaxy. However, accurately measuring the contribution of accretion to a galaxy's total stellar mass and its balance with in situ star formation poses a persistent challenge, as it is neither directly observable nor easily inferred from observational properties. Using data from MaNGA, we present theory-motivated predictions for the fraction of stellar mass originating from mergers in a statistically significant sample of nearby galaxies
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  • ESA’s Hera mission lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space /ESA - S. Corvaja
    Researchers Julia de León and Javier Licandro of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) are participating in the Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) , successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) on 7th October at 14:52 UTC. This is the first European mission for planetary defence which together with NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid redirection Test) will study the effects of a technique for diverting asteroids called “ kinetic impactor”. The DART probe crashed into the smaller ( Dimorphos) of the two asteroids which form the binary system Didymos, on September
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  • Artist’s impression of the accoustic oscillations of normal (“baryonic”) matter, taken from one of thousands of simulations used in the study/ Francisco-Shu Kitaura & Francesco Sinigaglia
    The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of Geneva (Switzerland), the University of Osaka (Japan), and the University of Zhejiang (China) has made a key contribution to a more precise measurement of the expansion of the Universe. This is because they have made an improvement in the precision of the calculation of the scale of the universe in its early stages using the analisis of the distribution of gas in intergalactic space, measurements which reach back to epochs between 10,000 and 12,000 million years ago. This result comes from the análisis of
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  • Action space (normalized to the sum of the three actions of motion, Jtot) of Gaia RVS stars
    The formation and evolution of the disk of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, remains an enigma in astronomy. In particular, the relationship between the thick disk and the thin disk —two key components of the Milky Way— is still unclear. Understanding the chemical and dynamical properties of the stars within these disks is crucial, especially in the parameter spaces where their characteristics overlap, such the metallicity regime around [Fe/H] ~ -0.7, which marks the metal-poor end of the thin disk, higher than that of the thick disk. This is often interpreted as an indication that the thin disk
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