The first billion years of cosmic history represents the final frontier in assembling a coherent physical picture of early galaxy formation, and a remarkable progress in this area has been made in the last few years. We have carried out a detailed analysis of a gravitationally lensed galaxy A2744_YD4 at z = 8.38 behind the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The photometric redshift of about 8, estimated from HST, VLT and Spitzer data, was confirmed by the detection of the Ly_alpha line at a redshift of z=8.38 in a deep VLT X-SHOOTER spectrum. The follow-up observations with the Atacama Large

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 Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) have edited an astronomical calendar in poster format (only in Spanish) illustrated with the image of the "Fireworks" Galaxy , NGC 6946, taken with the OSIRIS instrument on the GTC at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma). Credit: GTC team/ Daniel López/ IAC. Design: Ramón Castro and UC3 (IAC). You can pick up free copies of this calendar in the coming days, until stocks run out, at Reception in the IAC Headquarters, La Laguna (from 8.00h to 18.00h) and from the Astrophysics Centre, La

Giuseppe Bono, astrophysicist and associate professor of the Department of Physics at the Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata" (Italy), is currently Chair of the E-ELT Project Science Team, the future 39m European Extremely Large Telescope, intended to be the largest optical-infrared telescope in the world. Interested in the evolution of stars, pulsations and stellar populations, as well as cosmological parameters based on these objects, he has visited the IAC several times, both as a researcher and professor at the Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics that has been annually