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

The ceremony will be webcast live from the website of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

She has opened EWASS 2015 with a talk about the 50th anniversary of the publication of the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background

1200 astronomers from 50 countries will take part

The largest gathering of European astronomers will meet in Tenerife for a week