For the past weeks telescopes all over the world have been pointed at V404 Cygni where a black hole is gobbling up the mass of its neighbouring star. The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) is leading the optical observations of this unique phenomenon.

By IVÁN JIMÉNEZ Michela Mapelli, a researcher at the Padua astronomical observatory, belonging to the INAF, is interested in the forces at work in galaxies, and especially in the dark side of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The problem of our Galaxy is that when you try to get to the heart of it you end up rather frustrated. As well as being in a difficult position to study it,- right in the plane, and about half way from the centre to the edge, the main obstacle is interstellar dust which blocks our line of sight to the Galactic nucleus, where there is a very strong indication that a

Álvaro Giménez, the scientific director of ESA will give a lecture in the Museum of Science and the Cosmos during EWASS 2015

Experts in Astronomical Site Testing met in Tenerife during EWASS 2015

The European Week of Astronomy and Space Science EWASS 2015 which is being celebrated during this week on the Guajara Campus of the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) includes 40 parallel sessions in which the lates advances in astronomy are presented. During today’s programme, among the themes are news about the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency, and two plenary sessions to celeb rate the 20 th anniversary of the discovery of the first brown dwarf, and the discovery o f the first exoplanet.   The Gaia satellite has covered the whole sky  One of the symposia of EWASS 2015 is devoted

By IVÁN JIMÉNEZ Twenty years ago an exceptional discovery blurred forever the boundary between what we call stars and what we call planets. A star is characterized by producing nuclear reactions in its interior. However in 1995 a group of researchers of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), among them Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio (now at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB-CSIC-INTA) discovered an object which appeared to be a star, but without sufficient mass to produce significant nuclear reactions. Although it was given the name Teide-1, the scientists had in fact found a type of