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.

  • Artist's impression of the atmosphere of Gliese 486b. Credit: RenderArea
    During the past 25 years astronomers have discovered a wide variety of exoplanets, made of rock, ice and gas, thanks to the construction of astronomical instruments designed specifically for planet searches. Also, using a combination of different observing techniques they have been able to determine a large numher of masses, sizes, and hence densities of the planets, which helps them to estimate their internal composition and raising the number of planets which have been discovered outside the Solar System.
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  • Thumbnails of TNG50 (top left) and SDSS (bottom left) quenched galaxies. The top and bottom right panels show the pixel-wise contributions to the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) for the TNG50 and SDSS galaxies, respectively. See Zanisi et al. (2021) for more details.
    Can neural networks distinguish computer simulated galaxy images from observed galaxies? This is the question that has been addressed in this work. For years, reproducing the morphological diversity of galaxies has been a problem for cosmological simulations. The new generation of simulations, such as Illustris TNG, are becoming more and more realistic. But enough to fool a neural network? In this work it is shown that it does not. Using unsupervised deep generative models, it is shown that, despite the fact that realism increases greatly in the last generation of simulations and with
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  • The unprecedented spectropolarimetric observations achieved during the CLASP2 space experiment.  For detailed information, see http://ow.ly/S2gS50DF0wS. Credit: NAOJ, IAC, NASA/MSFC, IAS.
    The solar chromosphere is the region between the relatively thin and cold photosphere (temperature of a few thousand degrees) and the hot and extended corona (temperatures above a million degrees). Although the chromosphere is much less hot than the corona, it is also significantly denser and thus much more energy is required to sustain it. Moreover, the mechanical energy necessary to heat the corona needs to traverse the chromosphere, making it a crucial interface region to understand how this energy propagates and is released in the most violent activity of the solar upper atmosphere
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  • Reconstruction of the cosmic web (shaded areas in grey in the left panel) based on a distribution of galaxies (in red in the left panel) and the primordial fluctuations (right panel). Credit: Francisco-Shu Kitaura (IAC).
    The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has led an international team which has developed an algorithm called COSMIC BIRTH to analyse large scale cosmic structures. This new computation method will permit the analysis of the evolution of the structure of dark matter from the early universe until the formation of present day galaxies. This work was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
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  • Solar active region artistic simulation
    Every day space telescopes provide spectacular images of the solar activity. However, their instruments are blind to its main driver: the magnetic field in the outer layers of the solar atmosphere, where the explosive events that occasionally affect the Earth occur. The extraordinary observations of the polarization of the Sun’s ultraviolet light achieved by the CLASP2 mission have made it possible to map the magnetic field throughout the entire solar atmosphere, from the photosphere until the base of the extremely hot corona. This investigation, published today in the journal Science
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  • Schematic diagram of the evolution of the Universe from the inflation (left) to the present (right). The “reconstruction method” winds back the evolution from right to left on this illustration to reproduce the primordial density fluctuations from the current galaxy distribution. Credit: Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISN).
    A team of astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe applying it to 4,000 simulated universes. To do so they used the ATERUI II supercomputer, at the Japanese observatory and the fastest in the world dedicated to astronomical simulations.
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