An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), has unveiled a breakthrough explanation for the origin of tiny, jet-like plasma ejections in the solar atmosphere, known as “nanojets.” These elusive events which are recently discovered by the NASA’s solar telescopes are thought to play an important role in heating and sustaining the solar corona at temperatures above one million Kelvin. Why Study Nanojets? For decades, solar physicists have been puzzled by the so-called “coronal heating problem.” While the Sun

From today until 5 December 2025, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is hosting the SO/PHI Science and Team Meetings, an international gathering focused on the scientific and technical advances of the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) instrument aboard ESA's Solar Orbiter (SO) space mission. The development of PHI was co-led by the Spanish Space Solar Physics Consortium (S3PC), which also currently coordinates its scientific operation and exploitation. The IAC is part of this network. PHI is a high-precision solar observation instrument equipped with two telescopes—one

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile, today released its first images of the universe, known in astronomy as an instrument's “first light”. This event marks the beginning of a project that will revolutionise our understanding of the universe over the next decade. Jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating, as part of a consortium of Spanish institutions, in its scientific exploitation and contributing observation time from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or