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 team of astronomers led by ICE-CSIC analyzed for the first time a long radio-observation of a scallop-shell star in a pioneer study. The team observed the star using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) located in Pune (India), and related it to the photometric information from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Las Cumbres Global Telescope Observatory. Scallop-shell stars are a recently discovered class of young M dwarfs. More than 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs, although there are only around 50 recently confirmed scallop-shell stars. They show

An international scientific team, with the participation of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a new world similar in size to our planet orbiting an ultra-cold red dwarf located about 55 light-years away. Observations from the SPECULOOS telescope network, which includes the ARTEMIS telescope at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, have made this discovery possible. The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, has also played a key role in confirming the discovery, providing some of the most accurate ground