From 3 to 23 November, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) will bring astronomy to the public in the form of multiple activities, workshops and talks on the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Further information: Spanish Release

The GLORIA (GLObal Robotic-telescopes Intelligent Array) will carry out a direct transmission of the event from Kenya. GLORIA will also perform various educational activities with students.

When the first exoplanet was discovered orbiting a star in 1995 the astrophysics community could not have imagined that, two decades later, the study of exoplanets would form one of the fundamental pillars of modern astronomy, and that the number of exoplanets discovered would reach a total of 1000, as attested by the latest edition of The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia. With the excuse of having reached such a round number of planets found we now present you with so key facts on these distant worlds beyond the Solar System. For this we let Hans Deeg and Roi Alonso, researchers at the

The IAC has launched the SolarLab, an outreach project aiming to bring the mysteries of the Sun to secondary schools and colleges in the Canary Islands. The project loans a solar telescope to educational centres for a week so that students can observe the closest star to the Earth. The star has just passed what is known as 'solar maximum', which occurs every 11 years and marks the ideal moment at which to observe and study the Sun. The project will run for two years and will be supplemented with educational courses for teaching staff in the islands in order to improve their knowledge of the

The finding will help to clarify the nature of main belt comets (MBC) , bodies with an asteroidal orbit which , however , have a tail like a comet.

By Natalia Ruiz Zelmanovitch There are many kinds of stars in the Universe that are generally classified according to their brightness and colour. The brighter a star is, the bigger it is, and this property is directly related to the mass and age of the star. The most massive stars rapidly consume all the fuel in their interior, and this means not only that their lives are shorter than those of less massive stars but also that their deaths are spectacular. When they reach their end, they explode as supernovae, providing us, in most cases, with an impressive display in the form of magnificent