An international team led by Cristina Ramos Almeida, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe five dust-obscured quasars — and the results offer new insights into how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes may evolve. The study is published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics . The energy released by supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies is a fundamental ingredient in regulating the formation of new stars, and thus galaxy growth. This occurs during an active phase, usually
The new infrared spectrograph NIRPS, built with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and installed on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, has achieved its first scientific results, with four articles published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and one more accepted for publication. The data confirm its ability to detect Earth-like planets in the infrared for the first time with a precision better than one metre per second. One of the papers, led by IAC researcher Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, confirms the presence of a
The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) have collaborated in the research that reveals the structure of 74 exocomet belts, it means, belts with minor bodies outside our solar system, around stars close to us. Astrophysicists led by a team from Trinity College Dublin , with the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) and Instituto de Aastrofísica de Canarias (IAC) collaboration- have for the first time imaged a large number of exocomet belts around nearby stars, and the tiny pebbles within them. The crystal-clear images show light being emitted from these