The robotic Transient Survey Telescope (TST) installed in the Teide Observatory of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has successfully started its scientific observations. It is a 1 metre telescope which permits the detection of rapidly varying objects, and is set up to map the sky. The TST has been built and run via a public-private collaboration with Canary funding. The Transient Survey Telescope (TST) is a telescope with a 1 metre primary mirror, built to take long-term observations called surveys, for the detection of faint, rapidly varying objects over a wide area of the sky
The existence of dark matter is likely one of the most perplexing problems facing the scientific community, and unraveling its nature has become one of the primary goals of modern physics. In simple terms, we do not know what dark matter is made of, despite accounting for 85% of all the matter in the Universe. A study led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias concludes that dark matter does not behave as described by the dominant paradigm, which states that dark matter particles only interact with each other and with ordinary matter through gravity. The IAC study reveals that dark
The Solar System research group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating in the international programme to keep a closet track of asteroid 2024 YR4. The aim is to determine its orbit with the highest possible precision before it stops being observable by ground based and satellite telescopes in April, and so improving our value of the probability that it will impact the Earth in 2032. In this context several telescopes of the Canary Observatories of the IAC are playing an outstanding role in this observing campaign: The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de