The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is collaborating with this multidisciplinary festival for Astrophysics and Space SciencesThe second event, which has the slogan "Beginnings: the making of the modern cosmos" will take place in Tenerife and La Palma from 22 to 28 September 2014

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The discovery of this striking pair is published today in Nature

Three decades ago one of the first astronomical satellites designed toobserve X-rays detected a new type of object: it had a much higher luminosity than any star, but much lower than other types of identified sources, such as the nuclei of active galaxies. They were dubbed, in a not very imaginative way, ultraluminous X rays (ULX) sources. Even recently we were still not really sure what they are. In this work, we have managed to solve this mystery and we have found that the mechanism which produces such a large luminosity in the most thoroughly studied ULX is not, as many had hoped, an

Isolated cool white dwarf stars more often have strong magnetic fields than young, hotter white dwarfs which has been a puzzle because magnetic fields are expected to decay with time but a cool surface suggests that the star is old. In addition, some white dwarfs with strong fields vary in brightness as they rotate, which has been variously attributed to surface brightness inhomogeneities similar to sunspots, chemical inhomogeneities  and other magnetooptical effects. Here we describe optical observations of the brightness and magnetic field of the cool white dwarf WD1953-011 taken over

We explore a sample of 148 solar-like stars to search for a possible correlation between the slopes of the abundance trends versus condensation temperature (known as the Tc slope) with stellar parameters and Galactic orbital parameters in order to understand the nature of the peculiar chemical signatures of these stars and the possible connection with planet formation. We find that the Tc slope significantly correlates (at more than 4σ) with the stellar age and the stellar surface gravity (see Figure 1). We also find tentative evidence that the Tc slope correlates with the mean