One of the biggest recent surprises in astronomy is the discovery that most stars like the Sun harbor a planet between the size of Earth and Neptune within the orbit of Mercury — sizes and orbits absent from our solar system. These ‘ super-Earths' and ` sub-Neptunes’ are the galaxy's most common planets, but their formation has been shrouded in mystery. Now, an international team of astronomers has found a crucial missing link. By weighing four newborn planets in the V1298 Tau system, they've captured a rare snapshot of worlds in the process of transforming into the galaxy's most common

An international scientific team, involving the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has identified the cause of an unusually long dimming of a distant star . The phenomenon is explained by the passage of a substellar object with a giant ring system, similar to a ‘cosmic saucer’, in front of the host star. The star, named ASASSN-24fw, is located in the Monoceros constellation at about 3,000 light-years away from Earth. The star faded steadily for more than nine months between late 2024 and mid-2025 to about 97% dark before returning to its normal

A team of scientists, including astrophysicist Carlos Hernández Monteagudo from the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), has compiled one of the most comprehensive catalogues of small bodies in the Solar System, based on photometric observations made from Earth. The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, compiles data on 6,579 asteroids, comets and irregular satellites, mainly from the main belt located between Mars and Jupiter, opening up new possibilities for studying their composition and rotation. The