The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is once again participating in the Miniferias de la Ciencia y la Innovación en Canarias, reinforcing its commitment to popularising science and bringing astronomy closer to the Canarian public. Through its Scientific Communication and Culture Unit (UC3), the research centre is taking part in the activities organised in La Palma from 22 to 24 May. Become astro-detectives for a day Astrophysicists and popularisers Alfred Rosenberg and Alejandra Goded lead the activity ‘Astro-detectives: How do astrophysicists study the Universe?’, an interactive

A global team of astronomers and machine learning researchers today announced the release of the " Multimodal Universe" - a groundbreaking 100 terabyte dataset that brings together hundreds of millions of astronomical observations in unprecedented detail and scale. This massive collection of space data aims to revolutionize how artificial intelligence can be applied to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. " The Multimodal Universe makes accessing machine learning-ready astronomical datasets as easy as writing a single line of code," says Helen Qu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Flatiron

The single star nearest to the Sun is called Barnard’s star. A team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has recently detected a ‘sub-Earth’ orbiting it. This exoplanet, called Barnard b has at least half the mass of Venus and orbits rapidly around its star, so that its year lasts only a little over three Earth days. This new exoplanet is sixteen times nearer to Barnard’d star than Mercury is to the Sun, and has a surface temperature close to 125oC, so it does not have liquid water on its surface. This discovery, led by the IAC in collaboration with a number