An international scientific team, in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participates, has discovered the extremely eccentric orbit of a gas giant exoplanet. This world, called TIC 241249530 b, not only follows one of the most drastically stretched-out orbits of all known transiting exoplanets, but also is also orbiting its star backwards, lending insight into the mystery of how these high-mass gas giants evolve into hot Jupiters , with very close and circular trajectories. The study is published in Nature. Within the population of known exoplanets, there are those that

An international team, including a researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has obtained an incredible image of the planetary nebula NGC 1514 using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), revealing the nebula's spectacular dusty rings in unprecedented detail. NGC 1514 was one of the first nebulae to be studied by astronomer William Herschel, who noted that when viewed through his telescope (the biggest in the World at the time) the nebula looked like a fuzzy cloud somewhat similar in appearance to one of his other discoveries: the planet Neptune. The new images acquired

The existence of dark matter is likely one of the most perplexing problems facing the scientific community, and unraveling its nature has become one of the primary goals of modern physics. In simple terms, we do not know what dark matter is made of, despite accounting for 85% of all the matter in the Universe. A study led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias concludes that dark matter does not behave as described by the dominant paradigm, which states that dark matter particles only interact with each other and with ordinary matter through gravity. The IAC study reveals that dark