An international scientific team, involving the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has identified the cause of an unusually long dimming of a distant star . The phenomenon is explained by the passage of a substellar object with a giant ring system, similar to a ‘cosmic saucer’, in front of the host star. The star, named ASASSN-24fw, is located in the Monoceros constellation at about 3,000 light-years away from Earth. The star faded steadily for more than nine months between late 2024 and mid-2025 to about 97% dark before returning to its normal

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 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