Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the Instituto de Ciencias del Cosmos de la Universidad de Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Instituto de Estudios Espaciales de Cataluña (IEEC), have carried out the largest observational study to date on massive runaway stars including rotation and binarity in the Milky Way. This work, recently published in Astronomy & Astrophysics , sheds light on how these stellar “fugitives” are launched into space and what their properties reveal about their intriguing origins. Runaway stars are stars that travel through

Researchers from around the world are taking part in the China–Spain Astronomical Collaboration on High-Resolution Spectroscopy 2025, an event organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), the Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics & Technology (NIAOT), and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) team. The aim of the conference is to strengthen and consolidate scientific cooperation between China and Spain in the field of high-resolution spectroscopy, one of the key areas for studying stars, galaxies

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, among the tiniest and faintest galaxies known, may hold the key to understanding one of the Universe’s biggest mysteries: the true nature of dark matter. A new study reveals that even a single collision between dark matter particles every 10 billion years — roughly the age of the Universe — is enough to explain the dark matter cores observed in these small systems. These galaxies, which contain only a few thousand stars, are dominated by dark matter and have relatively simple evolutionary histories. That makes them ideal cosmic laboratories for testing theories