The international consortium Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V (SDSS-V) has appointed Dr Sebastián Francisco Sánchez, researcher at the Institute of Astronomy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and senior scientist on leave from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), as director of the Local Volume Mapper (LVM) project, one of the three surveys that make up the SDSS-V. This appointment recognises Dr Sánchez's academic excellence and consolidates the collaboration with the IAC, with which the researcher has maintained a close scientific relationship for many years. Dr Sánchez

A team from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has quantified for the first time the impact that the motions of binary stars can have on estimates of dark matter in some of the smallest galaxies in the universe. The study proposes a new methodology that will make it possible to obtain more precise measurements of the amount of dark matter present in these systems. The Milky Way, our galaxy, contains hundreds of billions of stars. However, dozens of much smaller galaxies orbit around it, dwarf companions that host thousands of times fewer stars and live embedded within our galaxy