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.

  • Accretion disks around compact objects are expected to enter an unstable phase at high luminosity. One instability may occur when the radiation pressure generated by accretion modifies the disk viscosity, resulting in the cyclic depletion and refilling of the inner disk on short timescales. Such a scenario, however, has only been quantitatively verified for a single stellar-mass black hole. Although there are hints of these cycles in a few isolated cases, their apparent absence in the variable emission of most bright accreting neutron stars and black holes has been a continuing puzzle. Here

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  • Pleiades Open Cluster

    After comparative studies of a sample of almost 50 open stellar clusters of different ages in the Milky Way, research led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) with collaboration by the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, shows that when these star clusters age they lose the majority of their less massive members. This result confirms that there are internal dynamical processes in open clusters caused by their long journeys through the Galaxy, which bring about the expulsion of these low mass stars. The study, published in the journal

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  • From Monday 23rd to Thursday 26th October, the first meeting of the large astronomical observatories in Spain will be held in the town of Los Cancajos, La Palma. Most of them are scientific projects belonging to the map of the Singular Scientific-Technical Facilities (ICTS) of Spain, grouped in the field of Astrophysics under the coordination of the Astronomy Infrastructure Network (RIA). In this first edition, the participants are the Centro Astronómico Hispano en Andalucía (CAHA), the Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GRANTECAN), the Institute de Radiaoastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM), the

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  • The IAC's Institutional Actions and Transfer Office (OTAI) held the third edition of the technical conference of the Research Results Transfer Offices (OTRIs) in the Canary Islands on La Palma. This meeting brought together fifty management teams and institutional representatives from a dozen public institutions of the archipelago to advance in the consolidation of collaborative work towards a Canary Islands Network of Knowledge Transfer Offices and R&D&I project management. The opening session was moderated by Anselmo Sosa, manager of the OTAI on behalf of the IAC, accompanied by the

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  • Members of the Space Working Group of the Competitiveness and Innovation Council of the European Union (Space Group) held a working meeting in San Cristóbal de La Laguna and visited the Teide Observatory and the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on 19 and 20 October respectively. The Space Group is responsible for the development of European space policy and related legislation.The visits are included in the activities within the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union and were organised by the Permanent Representation of Spain to the European Union. A

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  • Stellar ages are key to several fields of astrophysics such as exoplanet research, galactic-archeology, and of course stellar physics. Obtaining the ages of stars is however not straightforward and requires stellar modeling. The most widely used technique only requires stellar colors or temperature and surface gravity, but the uncertainties are quite large. This technique is most efficient for stars belonging to clusters, as they were born from the same molecular cloud and share the same ages. In the last decades, based on the study of stellar acoustic waves, asteroseismology became the most

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