An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has measured, with unprecedented accuracy, the gravitational redshift of the Sun, a change in frequency of the lines in the solar spectrum which is produced when the light escapes from the gravitational field of the Sun on its way to Earth. This work, which verifies one of the predictions of Einstein’s General Relativity, is to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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Astronomers have discovered thousands of planets outside the Solar System, most of which orbit stars that will eventually evolve into red giants and then into white dwarfs. During the red giant phase, any close-orbiting planets will be engulfed by the star, but more distant planets can survive this phase and remain in orbit around the white dwarf. Some white dwarfs show evidence for rocky material floating in their atmospheres, in warm debris disks or orbiting very closely, which has been interpreted as the debris of rocky planets that were scattered inwards and tidally disrupted. Recently
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Observational evidence s suggest a co-evolution of the central supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. In some of them, the black hole is ingesting the material surrounding it at a very high rate, emitting a large quantity of energy. In those cases we say that the galaxy has an active nucleus (AGN). Studying the mechanisms which control the relation between the active nucleus and the rest of the galaxy is essential to understand how these objects form and evolve, and to be able to throw light on this question we need to compare active and non-active galaxies. Here, we first identif
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An international scientific team, led by researchers at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA) and with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have found the galaxy BOSS-EUVLG1. This is the galaxy with star formation but almost no dust, the most luminous of its type known up to now. It was found using observations made with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands), and with the ATACAMA Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), in Chile. The discovery was recently published in the
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Some galaxies in the Universe display beautiful and appealing features known as "spiral arms". However, not all galaxies show spiral arms in the same manner. Among the variety of cases the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy infalling towards the Milky Way, stands out. The LMC is the prototype of an entire family of galaxies, the Magellanic Spirals that are characterised by the presence of a barred stellar structure near their centres and a single spiral arm. Spiral patterns can form after galactic collisions, with subsequent star formation piling up in these arms. Nevertheless, we
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The long-standing difference in chemical abundances determined from optical recombination lines and collisionally excited lines raises questions about our understanding of atomic physics, as well as the assumptions made when determining physical conditions and chemical abundances in astrophysical nebulae. Here, we study the recombination contribution of [O III] 4363 and the validity of the line ratio [O III] 4363/4959 as a temperature diagnostic in planetary nebulae with a high abundance discrepancy. We derive a fit for the recombination coefficient of [O III] 4363 that takes into account
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