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.

  • Pleiades Open Cluster

    After comparative studies of a sample of almost 50 open stellar clusters of different ages in the Milky Way, research led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) with collaboration by the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, shows that when these star clusters age they lose the majority of their less massive members. This result confirms that there are internal dynamical processes in open clusters caused by their long journeys through the Galaxy, which bring about the expulsion of these low mass stars. The study, published in the journal

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  • Stellar ages are key to several fields of astrophysics such as exoplanet research, galactic-archeology, and of course stellar physics. Obtaining the ages of stars is however not straightforward and requires stellar modeling. The most widely used technique only requires stellar colors or temperature and surface gravity, but the uncertainties are quite large. This technique is most efficient for stars belonging to clusters, as they were born from the same molecular cloud and share the same ages. In the last decades, based on the study of stellar acoustic waves, asteroseismology became the most

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  • Poster of the CLASP2.1 Scientific Meeting

    From 18 to 20 October, scientists from the USA, Japan and Europe meet at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) to discuss the results of the third CLASP space experiment to study the magnetic field of the solar chromosphere and the science of future solar missions. Several years ago, an international scientific team began developing a series of novel suborbital space experiments, with the goal of measuring the intensity and polarization of the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun emitted from one of the outer layers of its atmosphere, the chromosphere, very close to the base of the

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  • Instalation MiNiO Qaleraliq

    Between 27th August and 7th September the Shelios 2023 expedition tool a group of researchers and students at the south of Iceland and Greenland, where they set up two experiments to measure the natural darkness of the arctic night, and from where they broadcast the aurora borealis. Among the apparatus they installed is the autonomous MiNiO (Meteo Nano Observatory) controller, developed by the Technological Institute for Renewable Energies (ITER), for the Interreg EELabs project, coordinated by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). As well as making people aware of the problems of

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  • The amount and complexity of data delivered by modern galaxy surveys has been steadily increasing over the past years. New facilities will soon provide imaging and spectra of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Extracting coherent scientific information from these large and multi-modal data sets remains an open issue for the community and data-driven approaches such as deep learning have rapidly emerged as a potentially powerful solution to some long lasting challenges. This enthusiasm is reflected in an unprecedented exponential growth of publications using neural networks, which have gone

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  • INT and 2023 DZ2

    An international scientific team, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate, confirms that the asteroid, discovered with the Isaac Newton telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), follows an orbit synchronised with that of Jupiter, which reduces the probability of a collision with our planet in the coming decades. The celestial body is very solid, metallic, rotates ten times every hour and is about 40 metres long. The study is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Asteroid 2023 DZ2, detected in February with the

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