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.

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  • Normalized spectra of the GTC-1 (blue) and GTC-2 epochs (black), both centred at Hα. Telluric bands and diffuse interstellar bands, as well as reference velocities (1000 km/s and 1250 km/s) have been marked to highlight the blue-shifted absorption produced by the wind.
    Research news
    A cold wind during the discovery outburst of a black hole

    We present 12 epochs of optical spectroscopy taken across the discovery outburst of the black hole (BH) candidate MAXI J1803-298 with the Gran Telescopio Canarias and Very Large Telescope. The source followed a standard outburst evolution. This means it passed through the so-called "hard" and "soft" states, defined in terms of the relative contribution of high to low energy X-rays. The system displays a "triangular" shape in the hardness intensity diagram, consistent with that seen in high-inclination BH transients and the previously reported detection of X-ray dips. The two epochs observed

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  • Comparison of black holes by mass and temperature
    Press release
    Astronomers develop new method for taking the temperature of black holes

    An international research team led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has found a new method for measuring the masses of black holes based on the temperature of the gas which surrounds them when they are active. The results of the work have recently been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). The confirmation of the existence of black holes is one of the most basic results in astrophysics. There is a wide range of masses of black holes, from stellar-mass black holes, which are the result of the catastrophic final

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  • Black hole simulation
    Press release
    Powerful warm winds discovered during a neutron star eruption

    An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered blasts of hot, warm and cold winds from a neutron star consuming matter from a nearby star. The study used a combination of observations made with several telescopes, including the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan), located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma). The discovery, published today in the journal Nature, provides new insight into the behaviour of some of the most extreme objects in the Universe. Low-mass X-ray binaries

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  • Image of the Cygnus-X region near the Cygnus OB2 association. 2MASS J20395358+4222505 is the star with the red border (revealing the high extinction) near the top left corner. (Courtesy of the GALANTE project, I.P. J. Maíz Apellániz).
    Research news
    The nature of an extreme B supergiant in Cygnus

    2MASS J20395358+4222505 is an obscured early B supergiant near the massive OB star association Cyg OB2. Despite its bright infrared magnitude (Ks= 5.82) it has remained largely ignored because of its dim optical magnitude (B= 16.63, V= 13.68). In a previous work we classified it as a highly reddened, potentially extremely luminous, early B-type supergiant. We obtained its spectrum in the U, B and R spectral bands during commissioning observations with the instrument MEGARA@GTC. It displays a particularly strong Hα emission for its spectral type, B1 Ia. The star seems to be in an intermediate

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  • 2MASS J20395358+4222505
    Press release
    Astronomers find in the Milky Way an unusual blue supergiant star travelling at high velocity

    An international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has found one of the most massive and luminous stars in our galaxy, behind a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust. It is a supergiant, with a mass almost 50 times the mass of the Sun, with a radius almost 40 times the solar radius, and a luminosity approaching a million times that of our own star, and has been given the descriptor 2MASS J20395358+4222505. But its most disconcerting aspect for the researchers is a variation in its velocity of

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