Astronomers have used telescopes around the world, includingthe Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, to study the asteroid 1998 KY26, revealing it to be almost three times smaller and spinning much faster than previously thought. The asteroid is the 2031 target for Japan’s Hayabusa2 extended mission. The new observations offer key information for the mission’s operations at the asteroid. “We found that the reality of the object is completely different from what it was previously described as,” says astronomer Toni Santana-Ros, a

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) has confirmed the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of HD 20794, a nearby Sun-like star. This discovery, the result of over two decades of observations, opens a window to future studies of Earth-like planetary atmospheres. The search for planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars is crucial for understanding the possibility of life beyond Earth and for studying conditions similar to those that enabled the development of life on our own planet. In this context, HD 20794, a star

The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), located on La Palma, has reached another important milestone with the installation of the camera of the LST-4, one of the four Large-Sized Telescopes (LST), which will be part of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), currently under construction. The installation of the camera represents the completion of the telescope assembly and marks its transition to the commissioning phase. After a thorough performance evaluation at the IACTEC building, the IAC's technological and business