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On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has received a very special recognition: the issue by Correos of a commemorative stamp celebrating the centre's four decades of history, research and technological development. The stamp is part of the philatelic series ‘ESPAÑA ES. Science’, a collection that highlights science, technology and innovation as drivers of economic and social development. Under the slogan ‘40 years dreaming stars’, this issue highlights the role of the IAC as an international reference in astrophysics and the relevance of itsAdvertised on
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The universality of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) is one of the most widespread assumptions in modern Astronomy and yet, it might be flawed. While observations in the Milky Way generally support an IMF that is invariant with respect to the local conditions under which stars form, measurements of massive early-type galaxies systematically point towards a non-universal IMF. To bridge the gap between both sets of evidence, in this work we measured for the first time the low-mass end of the IMF from the integrated spectra of a Milky Way-like galaxy, NGC3351. We found that the slope ofAdvertised on
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The single star nearest to the Sun is called Barnard’s star. A team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has recently detected a ‘sub-Earth’ orbiting it. This exoplanet, called Barnard b has at least half the mass of Venus and orbits rapidly around its star, so that its year lasts only a little over three Earth days. This new exoplanet is sixteen times nearer to Barnard’d star than Mercury is to the Sun, and has a surface temperature close to 125oC, so it does not have liquid water on its surface. This discovery, led by the IAC in collaboration with a numberAdvertised on