The Institute of Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics (IRyA) at UNAM, Campus Morelia invites the all public to observe the sky with telescopes and attend the “Astronomy Fridays” 2024 talks cycle. This year, IRyA’s academic staff will share general public talks on various topics related to astronomy, such as artificial intelligence (AI), eclipses, the calendar, the Webb space telescope, unidentified aerial phenomena, stars and gravitational waves.

In an unexpected twist, a new study revealed that a star in a young double system is lighter than previously thought, challenging stellar evolution models. The work was led by Jazmı́n Ordóñez-Toro, a doctoral student in Astrophysics at the Institute of Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics (IRyA) at UNAM, Campus Morelia.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has released new images of M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, using data from observations taken in April 2018.  With the participation of the newly commissioned Greenland Telescope and a dramatically improved recording rate across the array, the 2018 observations give us a view of the source independent from the first observations in 2017.

Vanessa Yanza, an Astrophysics Ph.D. student at the Institute of Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics (IRyA) at UNAM, Campus Morelia, received on November 24 the “Ing. Sergio Viñals” prize for the best Master's thesis in the space field in Mexico, on behalf of the organizing committee of the International Conference on AeroSpace Science and Technology (ICASST) 2023.

At the Morelia Planetarium “Lic. Felipe Rivera” and the Old Jesuit College Cultural Center in Patzcuaro, around two thousand people enthusiastically took part in the activities of the Noche de las Estrellas 2023 in Michoacán, which main theme was women in space, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the first space flight of Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut who was the first woman in space.