Scientists working with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) observatory report the discovery of the most distant gamma-ray source ever observed at very high energies, thanks to the “replay” of an enormous flare by a galactic gravitational lens as foreseen by Einstein’s General Relativity.

Between her stay at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in Garafía (La Palma), where Julia de León was gathering data for her PhD thesis on over a hundred asteroids, and the NASA space missions in which she is now involved, there have been years of enormous effort and observations. In La Palma she began to specialize in the mineral composition of asteroids, and as the years have passed her research is still oriented towards discovering what is happening on objects which are a thousands of kilometres from us, to understand better what is happening here on Earth. Today this researcher at

If studying the Earth's atmosphere and all the processes which control it sounds very complicated, imagine doing this for all the planets of the Solar system. Then imagine that, using mathematical formulae, you could build climate models which reproduce the different atmospheric phenomena that occur, for example on Venus or on Titan (the largest moon of Saturn). All this is possible, and these models can even be used to improve our understanding of the Earth's climate and even, in the last analysis, to find exoplanets with the characteristics necessary to support life. This is the research

The XXVIII Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, which will last until 16th November, began with the lectures by Sebastien Lebonnois, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and an expert in the atmospheres of planets such as Venus and Titan.

Just as its previous years, this institute will collaborate in the activities of the Minifestivals in Grand Canary and in Tenerife, will offer guided visits by schoolchildren to the Teide Observatory, and will present, in the Museum of Science and the Cosmos, the audiovisual series "IAC Investiga" and also the project Niépce: from the negative to the positive" a tribute from astronomy to photography during its 200th anniversary, because it allowed the data content from telescopes to be boosted by a large factor.

A study shows that the most massive stars in the last stages of their lives are those which contaminate the interstellar medium with new chemical elements, giving rise to successive generations of stars in these "astronomical fossils".