Severo Ochoa Programme

Research News

  • Iglesia Camino de Santiago

    A study led by the researcher of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias Maitane Urrutia-Aparicio has shown the relevance of sunrise on Easter Sunday, one of the most important Christian festivities, in the orientation of Romanesque churches on the Camino de Santiago. This work exposes the close relationship between the sky and the orientation of the constructions of the Jacobean Route. It also shows that medieval societies already included temporal symbolism in the construction of their temples. The latest research results have been published in the journal Sustainability. "The main

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  • Winds launched by a supermassive black hole impact the formation of new stars in the galaxy Markarian 34

    Patricia Bessiere, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has led research which has used data from the KECK telescope in Hawaii to understand the impact that active galactic nuclei have on star formation in their host galaxies. The results are published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters. One of the key questions that astronomers are trying to answer is ‘Why do galaxies look the way they do?’. Computer simulations of how galaxies formed and evolved suggest that there should be many more very large galaxies than we actually

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  • ALMA cuásar

    Cristina Ramos Almeida, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has led research which used data from the ALMA telescope in Chile to understand how supermassive black holes impact the host galaxies they inhabit. The results are published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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  • Abell 370

    A team of researchers from the cosmology group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias has obtained one of the most accurate measurements of the masses of clusters of galaxies, and of their relation with the amount of hot gas in these clusters. To do this they have studied the dynamics of the galaxies in 570 clusters selected from the catalogue produced by the Planck satellite (ESA). This study has been produced during four years of work, in which over 10,000 spectra have been obtained with the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de los

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  • Norbert Langer

    Professor Norbert Langer is currently head of the Stellar Physics Group at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie (Bonn, Germany). Considered one of the world’s leading experts in the field of theoretical stellar Astrophysics, for more than three decades he has been researching the evolution of high mass, from their early stages to the point when they explode as supernovae. These stars play an important role in the evolution of their host galaxies. However, their short lifetime makes them very difficult to observe, raising many questions about their nature. A correct interpretation of the

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  • Nebulosa y M31

    A recent study led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has resolved an old debate about the progenitor stars of the brightest planetary nebulae. The first author of this article, which has just been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is Rebeca Galera Rosillo, a doctoral student at the IAC who passed away in 2020 when she was finishing this work for her doctoral thesis. The first and most important datum needed to grasp the nature of the universe is to know its size, to measure the distance to the galaxies. Just as in the Renaissance people began

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