Jairo Méndez Abreu and Adriana de Lorenzo-Cáceres, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have discovered a peanut-shaped structure in the inner bar of a double-barred galaxy close to the Milky Way. Structures of this type, previously detected only in outer, or single, bars are useful tracers of the evolution of the galaxies.
After two years travelling through space, the NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has started to obtain images of the mission target, primitive asteroid Bennu. As part of the Scientific Team of this mission, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Javier Licandro and Julia de León have already started to work in the calibration of this images in preparation for the ones that will be obtained in December 2018 using color filters.
A team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered a new case of galactic cannibalism in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way, which has caused the merging of two galaxies on the smallest scale so far known.
An international team of researchers, including David S. Aguado, Jonay González and Carlos Allende Prieto of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a star with extremely low metallicyt, one of the oldest in the Milky Way, and for that reason an excellent messenger from the early universe.
The study, led by Paula Izquierdo, a doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has gone deeply into the analysis of this exceptional white dwarf, which shows periodic transits produced by fragments of a shredded planetesimal. The observations used for this research were obtained with the Gran Telescopio Canarias and with the Liverpool Telescope.
A study involving a researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), which has been led by a researcher at the Instituto de Física Fundamental (IFF-CSIC) and the Instituto de Ciencias del Cosmos (UB-IEEC), argues that the explosion that Johannes Kepler observed in 1604 was caused by a merger of two stellar residues.
