“With TIMER we could demonstrate a very beautiful idea: If we measure the ages of the stars that were born in the bar via the secular evolution processes, we can estimate when the galactic disc settled into a dynamically mature state” “In order to understand well how galaxies came to be the way we observe them today we must understand well the effects driven by bars” “With the TIMER demonstration programme we have already shown for one galaxy that secular evolution started 10 billion years ago, and that the structure thus formed is actually old” By Elena Mora (IAC) On nights which are

In the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the mass of a galaxy acts on the light of a more distant object, as if it were a huge lens, producing a distorted image with the form of a so-called Einstein ring or multiple images and a magnification of the total flux, allowing to see details which would otherwise be too faint to detect. GTC/OSIRIS spectroscopic observations allowed to discover one of the brightest galaxies in the early Universe, BG1429+1202, located at a redshift of 2.82 (we see it as it was some 2,300 million years after the

We report the discovery of a new super-Earth orbiting the nearby cool dwarf star GJ 625 in the inner edge of the habitable zone. This result has been achieved thanks to the analysis of the radial velocity (RV) time series from the HARPS-N spectrograph, in particular, 151 HARPS-N measurements taken over 3.5 yr. The planet GJ 625 b has a mass of roughly 2.8 Earth masses and an orbital period of ~14.6 days at a distance of ~0.08 AU of its host star. The star GJ 625 is a low-activity M dwarf star located at 6.5 pc (~21 light years) from the Sun, with a stellar rotation period in the range 75-85

The so-called extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) are orbiting the Sun at heliocentric distances larger than 150 AUs, and their discovery a decade ago was soon recognized as a turning point in our knowledge of the outer Solar System. The currently tally stands at 21 ETNOs, and only one, Sedna, has been spectroscopically observed. In the last years several studies have suggested that the dynamical properties of the ETNOs could be better explained if one or several planets of several Earth masses are orbiting the Sun at hundreds of AUs. In 2016, Brown and Batygin used the orbits of seven