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
During the week from 16th to 20th September the International Conference LSST@Europe 6 will be held in La Palma a meeting which will bring together some 140 researchers in astrophysics from more than 20 countries. At the meeting the latest advances in the LSST project, a front-lione initiative in the exploration of the Universe which will be carried out at the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile and which has close collaboration from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). The project consists in carrying out a new and detailed census of the sky, called the Legacy Survey of Space and
An international team of researchers, including researchers from the IAC, have studied in detail a remarkable couple of dwarf galaxies “dancing with each other” inside an unpopulated area of the Universe. This uncommon pair of low-mass galaxies merging “in the middle of nowhere”, near the center of a cosmic void, offers a unique view of one-on-one interactions and of the evolution of galaxies located in very low density environments. Researchers from the Calar Alto Void Integral-field Treasury surveY (CAVITY) project, led by the University of Granada, have discovered a rare and ongoing
