James Webb Telescope’s Unparalleled View of the Ghostly Light in Galaxy Clusters
Data obtained by the new James Webb Space Telescope was used by a recent study that has produced the most complete analysis to date of…
Instituto De Astrofísica De Canarias News
Astronomers Discover Ancient “Failed Star” With Lithium Deposits Intact
A team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Mexico, has discovered…
Exoplanet-Hunting Satellite CHEOPS Unexpectedly Detects a Strange Planet “Without a Known Equivalent”
The exoplanet satellite hunter CHEOPS of the European Space Agency (ESA), in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating along with other…
Solved: Mysterious Solar Paradox That Puzzled Physicists for 25 Years
In 1998, the journal Nature published a seminal letter concluding that the mysterious polarization signal that had been recently discovered in the light emitted by…
Astronomers Discover How to Feed a Supermassive Black Hole
The black holes at the centers of galaxies are the most mysterious objects in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material…
Three Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies Discovered to Be Rotating in Orbit Around the Milky Way
An international team of astrophysicists has discovered the presence of transverse rotation (in the plane of the sky) in three dwarf spheroidal galaxies, a very…
Astronomers Discover a Massive Star Cluster – Hiding in Plain Sight – in the Constellation Scutum
An international team of astrophysicists led by the Stellar Astrophysics Group of the University of Alicante (UA), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and…
Finding “Missing” Matter: New Light on Baryonic Matter and Gravity on Cosmic Scales
Scientists estimate that dark matter and dark energy together are some 95% of the gravitational material in the universe while the remaining 5% is baryonic…
Astrophysicists Surprised by Unexpected Effect of Black Holes Beyond Their Own Galaxies
At the heart of almost every sufficiently massive galaxy there is a black hole whose gravitational field, although very intense, affects only a small region…
Galactic Warp: Does the Milky Way Move Like a Spinning Top?
An investigation carried out by the astrophysicists of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Žofia Chrobáková, a doctoral student at the IAC and the…
The Natural Brightness of the Night Sky: Analyzing 44 of the Darkest Places in the World
A recent study analyses data collected at 44 of the darkest places in the world, including the Canary Island Observatories, to develop the first complete…
DALI Experiment: An Astro-Particle Telescope for Dark Matter
The detection of the axion would mark a key episode in the history of science. This hypothetical particle could resolve two fundamental problems of Modern…
Astronomers Detect a New Super-Earth Orbiting a Red Dwarf Star
In recent years there has been an exhaustive study of red dwarf stars to find exoplanets in orbit around them. These stars have effective surface…
Alien Super-Earth Planet Discovered Just 26 Light Years Away – Probably Has an Atmosphere
During the past 25 years astronomers have discovered a wide variety of exoplanets, made of rock, ice, and gas, thanks to the construction of astronomical…
Unprecedented Map of the Sun’s Magnetic Field Created by CLASP2 Space Experiment
Every day space telescopes provide spectacular images of the solar activity. However, their instruments are blind to its main driver: the magnetic field in the…
Astrophysicists Solve Mystery of How Dark Matter Is Distributed in Galaxies
The gravitational force in the Universe under which it has evolved from a state almost uniform at the Big Bang until now, when matter is…
Solved: The Puzzle of the Strange Galaxy Made of 99.99% Dark Matter
At present, the formation of galaxies is difficult to understand without the presence of a ubiquitous, but mysterious component, termed dark matter. Astronomers have measure…
Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Verified by New Measurements of the Solar Spectrum
An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has measured, with unprecedented accuracy, the gravitational redshift of the Sun,…
