Severo Ochoa Programme

Research News

  • ESPRESSO

    Why does gravity have the strength it has? What exactly determines the value of the electromagnetic force? Are the laws of Physics the same in any part of the universe and at any instant in time? Measurements made with the ESPRESSO high resolution spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have permitted the determination of one of the fundamental constants of Physics when the universe was only 40% of its present age, helping to find an answer to one of these questions. The study, in which a leading group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participated, is

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  • GJ 367 b

    An international team, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered an extrasolar planet with half the mass of the Earth that takes approximately eight hours to orbit its parent star, a red dwarf just under 31 light-years from Earth. Called GJ 367 b, it is one of the lightest among the nearly 5.000 exoplanets known today. With a diameter of just over 9000 kilometres, this sub-Earth is slightly larger than Mars. The discovery not only demonstrates that it is possible to precisely determine the event the smallest, least massive exoplanets, but also

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  • V1298 Tau

    An international team of scientists, in which researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate together with other institutions from Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, UK, and Mexico, has been able to measure the masses of the giant planets of the V1298 Tau system, just 20 million year old. Masses for such young giant planets had not been obtained previously, and this is the first evidence that these objects have already reached their final size at very early stages of their evolution. For this study they have used radial velocity measurements from the HARPS-N

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  • Grupo Winter

    65 doctoral students and postgraduate researchers from 15 different countries participated, for 9 days, in the XXXII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, which this year was focused on clusters of galaxies, the largest gravitationally bound structures that we can observe in the Universe. Of the full complement of students, 55 were present at the school, while the other 10 followed the course on internet. As well as being one fo the first astrophysics meetings celebrated internationally with students present, this edition of the IAC Winter School was noteworthy for the highest

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  • (Left) Location of target PNe on an image of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). (Right) Hertzsprung-Russell diagram showing the location of PNe central stars and the theoretical model tracks. The final and corresponding initial masses are indicated on the tracks. Note the remarkable clustering of the brightest PNe central stars (green squares) on the 1.5 Msun track.

    Planetary nebulae (PNe) are the ejecta of evolved low-intermediate mass stars present in all stellar systems. Perhaps the easiest thing to do when studying PNe in a galaxy is just counting how many of them appear with a given luminosity, the Planetary Nebula Luminosity Function (PNLF). Not surprisingly, just a few very bright, and many more fainter, PNe populate the PNLF. But, most surprisingly, the bright end bin of the PNLF has a remarkably constant cut-off value in all galaxies and stellar systems studied so far, both young and old, with just a mild, calibrateable dependence on

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  • Top: final transmission spectrum and retrieved models for HAT-P-65b. The white circles refer to the data. The blue line and shading show the results from the full retrieval, while the red line and shading from the K-muted retrieval. Bottom: retrieved temperature-pressure (T-P) profiles and mass fractions for the full retrieval (left two) and K-muted retrieval (right two), respectively.

    We present the low-resolution transmission spectra of the puffy hot Jupiter HAT-P-65b (0.53 MJup, 1.89 RJup, Teq = 1930 K), based on two transits observed using the OSIRIS spectrograph on the 10.4 m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS. The transmission spectra of the two nights are consistent, covering the wavelength range 517–938 nm and consisting of mostly 5 nm spectral bins. We perform equilibrium-chemistry spectral retrieval analyses on the jointly fitted transmission spectrum and obtain an equilibrium temperature of 1645 (-244+255) K and a cloud coverage of 36 (-17+23) %, revealing a relatively

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