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.

  •  CARMENES 2024 Scientific Meeting

    The 19th scientific meeting of CARMENES, a collaboration of more than 100 scientists from 11 Spanish and German institutions aimed at studying extrasolar planets around M-type dwarf stars, the lowest mass stars, was held this week at the IACTEC facilities in La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain). Since it became operational in 2016, CARMENES has analysed more than 360 such stars, leading to the discovery of more than 65 new planets, making it the most efficient instrument and mapper in the study of planets around very low-mass stars, with 30 % of the total number of planets discovered in this range

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  • ALISIO-1 image of La Palma and El Hierro

    The first satellite developed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias,, which was launched into space last December, has sent back its first images. The quality of the observations shows the perfect performance of its DRAGO-2 infrared camera. The pointing test of its laser optical communications module has also been successfully carried out, making it the first Spanish satellite to use this technology. Today, at a press conference, the first images obtained with the ALISIO-1 satellite (Advanced Land-Imaging Satellite for Infrared Observations), an Earth observation satellite whose

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  • 2nd LIOM International Workshop

    From 14 to 16 February, the second scientific meeting of the Laboratory for Innovation in Opto-Mechanics (LIOM) will be held at the IACTEC building managed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the Science and Technology Park of La Laguna (Tenerife). This project is dedicated to the development of new optical and mechanical technologies that will form part of the next generation of telescopes capable of detecting biomarkers on exoplanets. One year after its creation, the IAC's Laboratory for Innovation in Opto-Mechanics (LIOM), is holding its second international meeting

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  • The Geminids 2020 meteor shower over the Tejeda Valley (Grand Canary).

    The results obtained from the over two hundred photometers put in place by the Interreg EELabs project during the past four years have been used to evaluated the impact of artificial night lighting on the night-time ecosystems of the achipelagos, especially on sea birds, but also to make the local people aware of this type of contamination. In Macaronesia (the collective name for the Atlantic Islands comprising the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde), natural night-time darkness is preservedonly in highly isolated natural reserves, such as the islands of Corvo and Graciosa (the

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  • Solar corona in visible light during a solar eclipse

    The POLMAG research group of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has released the public version of P-CORONA, a novel computer program for calculating the intensity and polarization of the light emitted by the million-degree plasma of the solar corona. This plasma diagnostic technique allows scientists to study the magnetic field of the solar corona by comparing their calculations with observations from the most advanced solar telescopes, such as DKIST and Aditya-L1. The solar corona is the outermost region of the solar atmosphere, where the explosive events that can seriously

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  • In the 90s, the COBE satellite discovered that not all the microwave emission from our Galaxy behaved as expected. Part of this signal was later assigned to a fresh new emission component, spatially correlated with the Galactic dust emission, which showed greater importance in the microwave range of frequencies. It has been named since as “anomalous microwave emission”, or AME. The current main hypothesis to explain the AME origin is that it is emitted by small dust particles which undergo fast spinning movements. In Fernández-Torreiro et al. (2023), we study the observational properties of

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