News

This section includes scientific and technological news from the IAC and its Observatories, as well as press releases on scientific and technological results, astronomical events, educational projects, outreach activities and institutional events.

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  • Spectra of the C-19 member stars observed with OSIRIS, normalized using a running mean filter after removing the velocity signal in the rest frame (black lines), together with the best fit (blue lines) derived by adopting a fitting procedure. The metallicity, [Fe/H], computed from [M/H] and [Ca/H] is also indicated for each star.
    Research news
    A stellar stream remnant of a globular cluster below the metallicity floor
    Stellar ejecta gradually enrich the gas out of which subsequent stars form, making the least chemically enriched stellar systems direct fossils of structures formed in the early universe. Although a few hundred stars with metal content below one thousandth of the solar iron content are known in the Galaxy, none of them inhabit globular clusters, some of the oldest known stellar structures. These show metal content of at least ~0.2 percent of the solar metallicity ([Fe/H] > -2.7). This metallicity floor appears universal and it has been proposed that proto-galaxies that merge into the
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  • Nebulosa y M31
    Press release
    The mystery of the brightest planetary nebulae
    A recent study led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has resolved an old debate about the progenitor stars of the brightest planetary nebulae. The first author of this article, which has just been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is Rebeca Galera Rosillo, a doctoral student at the IAC who passed away in 2020 when she was finishing this work for her doctoral thesis. The first and most important datum needed to grasp the nature of the universe is to know its size, to measure the distance to the galaxies. Just as in the Renaissance people began
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  • Left panel: spatial distribution of the auroral [N II] λ5755 emission line in the PN M 1-42 prior to applying the recombination contribution. Middle panel: spatial distribution of the N II λ5679 recombination line. Right panel: same as left panel after applying the recombination contribution correction.
    Research news
    MUSE reveals different gas components in planetary nebulae
    We present a detailed study of the gas chemical abundances in planetary nebulae (PNe), the final fate of solar-like stars, through high spatial resolution Integral Field Unit spectroscopy (IFU) obtained with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) attached to the 8.2-m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. We focused on three PNe with high abundance discrepancy factors (ADF > 20), which is a well-known and major unresolved problem in nebular astrophysics: chemical abundances obtained from faint optical recombination lines (ORL) yield systematically larger values than those obtained from
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  • Wolf-Rayet star
    Press release
    Astronomers discover first supernova explosion of a Wolf-Rayet star
    An international study, with the participation of researchers from the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan) affiliated to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a first-of-its-kind exploding star, thought to have existed only in theory. The findings are being published today in Nature. In the not-so-distant past, the discovery of a supernova – an exploding star – was considered a rare occasion. Today, advanced measuring instruments and analysis methods make it possible to detect fifty such explosions on a daily basis , which has also increased the probability
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  • Artist's picture of the remnant of globular cluster C-19 in the Milky Way.
    Press release
    A primitive stellar structure helps us to unravel the earliest phases of the Milky Way
    Just as archaeology examines the ground with great care to find valuable objects which helps us to get to know ancient civilizations, astronomers look at the stars in the Milky Way in the hope of finding clues to help us understand the earliest period of development of our Galaxy. A team of researchers, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias participates, publishes today in Nature the discovery of the oldest globular cluster remnant discovered to date. This study combines data from ESA's GAIA satellite with observations made at the Gran Telescopio Canarias, installed at the Roque
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  • Two different frames of the galaxy evolution, being an oblate system at early times (left) which is transformed into a prolate spheroid (right) due to a merger. Top: Line of sight velocity map. Bottom: RGB rendering using I, V, B filters.
    Research news
    Origin of stellar prolate rotation in a cosmologically simulated faint dwarf
    In the current cosmological model, galaxies are formed in a hierarchical way, by merging with each other. These mergers can lead to kinematic anomalies that can be used to shed light onto the formation history of the galaxy. However, it is important to be able to distinguish whether these anomalies are an unambiguous signal of a past merger or if they can originate from different processes . One of these kinematic anomalies is prolate rotation. A galaxy shows prolate rotation if it rotates around its major axis. This kinematic characteristic is relatively frequent in massive galaxies and it
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