A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics unveils a powerful way to determine the size of dark matter haloes—the massive, invisible structures that host galaxies—by simply measuring how large galaxies appear in deep astronomical images. Researchers Ignacio Trujillo and Claudio Dalla Vecchia, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), demonstrate that galaxy size can serve as a precise proxy for halo size, offering measurements up to six times more accurate than previous methods. Using the cutting-edge EAGLE cosmological simulations

The new infrared spectrograph NIRPS, built with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and installed on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, has achieved its first scientific results, with four articles published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and one more accepted for publication. The data confirm its ability to detect Earth-like planets in the infrared for the first time with a precision better than one metre per second. One of the papers, led by IAC researcher Alejandro Suárez Mascareño, confirms the presence of a

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