ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defense performed a flyby of Mars, as part of its gravitational assistance manoeuvre to shorten its journey to the binary asteroid system Didymos. During the flyby, the spacecraft came around 5000 km from the surface of Mars, having also the opportunity to obtain images of its two moons, Deimos (during the approach) and Phobos (when departing Mars). Julia de León, Javier Licandro, and George Prodan, researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, participate in this mission, successfully launched from Cape Cañaveral, Florida (USA) on October 7, 2024

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has successfully completed the integration of the scientific detector into the FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for Adaptive Optics) instrument, an integra-field camera and spectrograph designed to work with the adaptive optics system of the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan), the world's largest optical and infrared telescope, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma. The integration was carried out in the laboratories of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City by a team from the IAC

An international team of researchers, including staff from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a planetary nebula that destroyed its own planetary system, conserving the remaining fragments in the form of dust orbiting its central star. To date, more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars of all kinds and almost every stage of stellar evolution. However, while exoplanets have been discovered around white dwarfs – the final stage in the evolution of low- and intermediate-mass stars like the Sun, no exoplanets have been detected in the previous