The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is demonstrating the quality and international relevance of the Canary Islands Observatories at the 245th session of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting being held this week in Maryland (USA). This meeting, led by the American astrophysics community, brings together the world's most important research centres in this field to share lines of work and proposals for the present and the future. The IAC delegation in Maryland is headed by the director of the centre, Valentín Martínez Pillet, who is part of the panel of speakers with a

Next Friday, May 23, at 17:30, the Museum of Science and the Cosmos of Tenerife will host the popular science lecture "The James Webb Telescope: Highlights and Life Beyond Earth," delivered by the renowned British astronomer Martin Ward, Emeritus Temple Chevallier Professor of Astronomy at the University of Durham (UK) and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society . This event, organised as part of the European ExGal-Twin Project , will offer the public a unique opportunity to learn about the most significant advances made by the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful

A study published today in Nature Astronomy , in which a researcher from the IAC has participated, outlines the discovery of an extremely rare type of binary system composed of two high mass white dwarfs. The two stars are so close together that they will eventually collide resulting in a supernova explosion which, due to its proximity to the Earth, will appear ten times brighter than the Moon. Type 1a supernovae are a class of cosmic explosion often used as "standard candles" to measure the expansion of the Universe. They occur when a white dwarf exceeds the Chandrasekhar mass - the limit