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.

  • Rubidium is detected as a very intense absorption line at a wavelength of 7800 angstroms. This is a spectrum of one of the discovered rubidium-rich stars superimposed on an artist’s impression of an AGB star.

    It has been discovered that the most evolved intermediate-mass stars in our Galaxy are very rich in rubidium. This finding is the first observational evidence that these stars produce enormous quantities of the radioactive isotope 87Rb, as had been predicted from theoretical models of stellar nucleosynthesis more than 40 years ago.This result provides a new observational perspective on the nucleosynthesis of s-elements in AGB stars and imposes observational constraints on theoretical models, which will surely improve our understanding of the final stages in the evolution of intermediate-mass

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  • RSG1 is an enormously massive cloud in the Milky Way.

    LIRIS, the IR imaging camera and spectrograph built by the IAC, is giving life to new projects. During 2006 advances were made in the search for and analysis of IR clouds. RSG1 is shown in Figure 1. It is a cloud with fourteen red supergiants, (indicated in the figure, together with the relative coordinates at the centre of the cloud), implying that the it has a mass of 2-4 x 104 M¤. This would make it one of the most massive clouds in the Milky Way. Figure II shows the cloud ID066. The centre of the cloud can be seen with an extinction zone around it, which could have come from the original

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  • Composite image of the Orion Nebula in the [NII], Ha and [OIII] emission lines, codified respectively in red, green and blue. The details in black and white, to the side, illustrate the fields of motion divided into two zones of the nebula during the extr

    Using images from the HST archive of the Ha and [OIII] l5007A emission lines that are 6.84 years apart, variability in the temperature and density of ionized gas has been detected in intervals of one hundredth of a pc. The temperature variations are in the order of tens of degrees centigrade. Possible mechanisms for explaining this variability have been put forward, including the reconnection of magnetic fields induced by supersonic turbulence in the HII region. At the same time, it has been possible to detect and map the field of motion of gas driven by young or forming stellar winds

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  • Light curves of TRES_2 obtained using telescopes of the network and with two telescopes from the Observatorio del Teide: "IAC-80" and "TELAST" with different filters.

    In August 2006 a new planetary transit was discovered from data from the TrES network. The discovery was confirmed using radial velocity curves obtained with the Keck and characterised with light curves in different filters obtained using two telescopes at the Observatorio del Teide: "IAC80" and "TELAST" (the first result of scientific interest obtained from the latter). The planet discovered, TrES-2, is more massive and somewhat larger than its quasi-homonym TrES-1 (the first exoplanet discovered using the transit method), and follows the expected patterns for this type of object. Its main

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