The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is demonstrating the quality and international relevance of the Canary Islands Observatories at the 245th session of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting being held this week in Maryland (USA). This meeting, led by the American astrophysics community, brings together the world's most important research centres in this field to share lines of work and proposals for the present and the future. The IAC delegation in Maryland is headed by the director of the centre, Valentín Martínez Pillet, who is part of the panel of speakers with a

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

Omega Centauri is a large globular cluster, containing almost ten million stars, in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus, which has been studied to understand its stellar kinematics, the motions of its stars under the action of the gravitational forces which act on them. A research team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has just published a study which shows that a group of black holes dominates the movements of its stellar kinematics. This result can be extended to certain other structures in the universe and goes against some previous claims about the role of low