With data from NASA’s TESS satellite, from the now retired Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) an international team of astronomers, with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has detected what appears to be an intact planet in orbit around a white dwarf, the dense remains of a star similar to the Sun , and only 40 % bigger in diameter than the Earth. This finding is published today in Nature magazine.
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.
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After several months of waiting, this summer the EELabs project, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has started to deploy its first network of photometers.
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An international team of researchers, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the existence of resonant cavities above sunspots. These results, recently published in two articles in the journals Nature Astronomy and The Astrophysical Journal Letters, have settled a debate lasting several decades about the nature of the waves in the active regions of the Sun. Sunspots are darker regions which often appear on the Sun’s surface. They are caused by strong concentrations of magnetic field, and can be as big as the Earth, or even much bigger. From the end of the 1960’s
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X-ray binaries are stellar systems composed of a compact object (either a stellar-mass black hole or a neutron star) and a donor star that transfers mass to the former. Outflows represent fundamental physical phenomena to understand accretion processes in these systems. Black holes show three types of outflows: radio-jets and optical winds during the hard accretion states, and highly ionised winds observed in X-rays during the soft states. The black hole transient MAXI J1820+070 showed optical winds with velocities up to 1800 km/s during the hard state of its 2018-2019 outburst. In this work
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A team of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has detected for the first time the constant infrared emission from winds produced during the eruption of a black hole in an X-ray binary. Until now, these flows of material had been detected only in other wavelength ranges, such as X-rays or the visible, depending on the phase in which the black hole is consuming its surrounding material. This study provides the first evidence that the winds are present throughout the evolution of the eruption, independently of the phase, and this is a step forward in our
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All chemical elements in the Universe (except for H and most of the He) have been made in stellar interiors. But among those elements, the ones that allowed to build life such as we find on Earth are of particular interest (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus). However, the stellar origin of phosphorus (P) is still unknown as none of the current models of Galactic chemical evolution can explain all the phosphorus we observe in the Galaxy and notably in our Solar System, highlighting a still lacking phosphorus source. In this work we report the discovery of stars very rich in
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