Utilizando una técnica innovadora, un grupo de astrofísicos estadounidenses y del IAC descubren un planeta en órbita alrededor de una estrella joven situada a unos 100 años luz de distancia

It has been discovered that the most evolved intermediate-mass stars in our Galaxy are very rich in rubidium. This finding is the first observational evidence that these stars produce enormous quantities of the radioactive isotope 87Rb, as had been predicted from theoretical models of stellar nucleosynthesis more than 40 years ago. This result provides a new observational perspective on the nucleosynthesis of s-elements in AGB stars and imposes observational constraints on theoretical models, which will surely improve our understanding of the final stages in the evolution of intermediate

Using the IAC's Beowulf group of computers and the National Supercomputing Centre's Mare Nostrum, an IAC team has simulated the process of galaxy fusion by tracking the trajectory and interactions of more than a million particles. These simulations have made it possible to reproduce the behaviour of stellar velocities in elliptical galaxies.

LIRIS, the IR imaging camera and spectrograph built by the IAC, is giving life to new projects. During 2006 advances were made in the search for and analysis of IR clouds. RSG1 is shown in Figure 1. It is a cloud with fourteen red supergiants, (indicated in the figure, together with the relative coordinates at the centre of the cloud), implying that the it has a mass of 2-4 x 104 M¤. This would make it one of the most massive clouds in the Milky Way. Figure II shows the cloud ID066. The centre of the cloud can be seen with an extinction zone around it, which could have come from the original

Using images from the HST archive of the Ha and [OIII] l5007A emission lines that are 6.84 years apart, variability in the temperature and density of ionized gas has been detected in intervals of one hundredth of a pc. The temperature variations are in the order of tens of degrees centigrade. Possible mechanisms for explaining this variability have been put forward, including the reconnection of magnetic fields induced by supersonic turbulence in the HII region. At the same time, it has been possible to detect and map the field of motion of gas driven by young or forming stellar winds

In August 2006 a new planetary transit was discovered from data from the TrES network. The discovery was confirmed using radial velocity curves obtained with the Keck and characterised with light curves in different filters obtained using two telescopes at the Observatorio del Teide: "IAC80" and "TELAST" (the first result of scientific interest obtained from the latter). The planet discovered, TrES-2, is more massive and somewhat larger than its quasi-homonym TrES-1 (the first exoplanet discovered using the transit method), and follows the expected patterns for this type of object. Its main