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.

  • Multiband image of the interacting pair Arp 70 obtained from the SDSS archive. On the left, Arp 70b, the galaxy studied in this work. Credit: SDSS

    Research led by Artemi Camps, who started it while he was studying for his doctorate in the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna, and is now working at the Instituto de Astronomía of the UNAM (México) has discovered an expanding bubble in the disc of a galaxy. With a diameter of 15,000 light years, it is the largest bubble of its type observed in any galaxy. The study has recently been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A galaxy like the Milky Way is made up of hundreds of thousands of millions of stars, with a mixture

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  • A realistic artist’s impression of WASP-76b atmosphere

    Nature magazine is publishing today a surprising study about the giant, ultra-hot planet WASP-76b in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) have taken part. This exoplanet, 390 light years away towards the constellation Pisces, has days when its surface temperatures exceed 2,400 Celsius, sufficiently hot to evaporate metals. Its nights, with strong winds, cool down the iron vapour so that it condenses into drops of iron. This is the first result with the high resolution spectrograph ESPRESSO, an instrument co-directed by the IAC and installed on teh Very Large

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  • Artistic impression of one of the SPECULOOS telescopes, with the binary brown dwarf eclipsing in the sky

    An international team of astronomers in the project SPECULOOS, dedicated to the search for habitable planets, with scientists participating from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has discovered an eclipse (termed an occultation) in a peculiar brown dwarf formed by two stars orbiting around each other. The results are just published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The finding was by chance, when the scientists were working on the results from the first light of one of the four telescopes of the project, in Chile. Shortly after the building of the first SECULOOS telescopes, and

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  • Pulsating star in binary system

    An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has found for the first time an unusual star that oscillates on one side due to the gravitational attraction of another nearby star. The study, which is published in the journal Nature Astronomy, uses data from NASA's TESS satellite and has involved the collaboration of citizen scientists.

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  • Artistic representation of the white dwarf star

    An international team of researchers led by the University of Warwick, with a member who is a scientist at the IAC has discovered white dwarf with unusual dimensions. This star could be, in fact, the result of the merger of two white dwarfs. The discovery is published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, and could resolve some questions about the evolution of white dwarfs, and about the number of supernova in our Galaxy. The star, which is 150 light years away, was identified by data from the satellite telescope GAIA of the European Space Agency (ESA). Based on these, the astronomers used

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  • Comparative Milky Way and ultra-diffuse galaxy

    A study by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), led by researchers Nushkia Chamba, Ignacio Trujillo and Johan H. Knapen, reveals that the enigmatic ultra-diffuse galaxies, very low-luminosity and low-density star galaxies, are similar in size to dwarf galaxies. The results, which are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, provide new clues about the number and type of galaxies in our Universe and about the nature of dark matter.

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