An international team led by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, and including scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a nearby analogue of the enigmatic “Little Red Dots”. This finding opens a new window on how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the early Universe. Observations with the Gran Telescopio Canarias have been crucial to characterizing this object. Little Red Dots (LRDs hereafter) are among the most interesting discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) . First identified at

Astronomers have used telescopes around the world, includingthe Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, to study the asteroid 1998 KY26, revealing it to be almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. The asteroid is the 2031 target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 extended mission. The new observations offer key information for the mission’s operations at the asteroid. “We found that the reality of the object is completely different from what it was previously described as,” says astronomer Toni Santana-Ros, a