According to the latest cosmological models, large spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way grew by absorbing smaller galaxies, by a sort of galactic cannibalism. Evidence for this is given by very large structures, the tidal stellar streams, which are observed around them, which are the remains of these satellite galaxies. But the full histories of the majority of these cases are hard to study, because these flows of stars are very faint, and only the remains of the most recent mergers have been detected.

There are now 10 sensors monitoring the night-time darkness of the island of Corvo to determine the impact of artificial lighting on the sea birds. The installation of the photometers took place this week, thanks to municipal collaboration and that of SPEA Azores, one of the five centers in Macaronesia which are working in the project Interreg EELabs, coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. During the coming years the light pollution laboratory of the EELabs project on Corvo will measure the propagation of the artificial night-time lighting within the natural ecosystems of

Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

The exoplanet satellite hunter CHEOPS of the European Space Agency (ESA), in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating along with other European institutions, has unexpectedly detected a third planet passing in front of its star while it was exploring two previously known planets around the same star. This transit, according to researchers, will reveal exciting details about a strange planet “without a known equivalent”.

At the heart of almost every sufficiently massive galaxy there is a black hole whose gravitational field, although very intense, affects only a small region around the centre of the galaxy. Even though these objects are thousands of millions of times smaller than their host galaxies our current view is that the Universe can be understood only if the evolution of galaxies is regulated by the activity of these black holes, because without them the observed properties of the galaxies cannot be explained.

The pre-optics for HARMONI, the optical and infrared spectrograph to be installed on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) at Cerro Armazones (Chile), has passed successfully the test of the optomechanical design produced by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The instrument will now proceed to the Final Design Phase, prior to the start of the building of the instrument for this telescope of 39 metres in diameter, the largest project in optical and infrared astronomy of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).