An international team, led by a researcher from the University of Liège (Belgium) affiliated to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered an extraordinarily light planet orbiting a distant star in our galaxy. This discovery, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy, is a promising key to solving the mystery of how such giant, super-light planets form. The new planet, named WASP-193b, appears to dwarf Jupiter in size, yet it is a fraction of its density. The scientists found that the gas giant is 50 percent bigger than Jupiter, and about a tenth as dense — an

A study led by researcher Laura Scholz, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has found, for the first time, observational evidence that the evolution and the properties of the galaxies are conditioned not only by the mass of the stars they contain, but aso by the effect of the dark matter halos which surround them. The results are published in the specialist journal Nature Astronomy. Dark matter comprises around 85% of all the matter in the Universe. Although ordinary matter absorbs, reflects and emits light, dark matter cannot be seen directly, which makes its detection

The distribution of planets in the over five thousand distant solar systems discovered to date forms a complex puzzle. There is a region in the planetary orbit graph, known as the " Neptunian desert", where very few Neptune-like planets with orbits of between two and four days period around their star have been recorded to date. Now, a scientific team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IAA-CSIC) , using a novel technique, new planets around red dwarf stars located precisely in