A study published in the Astrophysical Journal supports models which question the need for the existence of this form of matter in galaxies

It will be its closest approach to the Earth (its perigee), at a distance of around 107 million kilometres, which is very close, considering that it originated in the Oort Cloud, at a distance from us of about a light year (some 9.5 billion kilometres). Although on those nights it will attain maximum brightness, it has not been as bright as was expected, so that it is not easy to find it with the naked eye. So binoculars are necessary, and a sky map, and we need to be at a place with dark sky to see the central zone of the comet. In spite of that it can be found near the Great Bear, and this

El presidente del Gobierno de Canarias visita el IAC Hoy, viernes 8 de enero, el presidente del Gobierno de Canarias, Fernando Clavijo, ha visitado la sede del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), en La Laguna, para reunirse personalmente con el Director del centro, Rafael Rebolo, y conocer de primera mano los proyectos en los que está involucrado el Instituto. En dicho encuentro, se le han planteado distintos asuntos que conciernen al estado actual del IAC, como el progreso de su plan estratégico y el de las grandes instalaciones telescópicas para los Observatorios de Canarias

In some AGN, nuclear dust lanes connected to kpc-scale dust structures provide all the extinction required to obscure the nucleus, challenging the role of the dusty torus proposed by the Unified Model. In this letter we show the pc-scale dust and ionized gas maps of Circinus constructed using sub-arcsec-accuracy registration of infrared VLT AO images with optical Hubble Space Telescope images. We find that the collimation of the ionized gas does not require a torus but is caused by the distribution of dust lanes of the host galaxy on ~10 pc scales. This finding questions the presumed torus

During the last decades, growing evidence about the presence of planetary material around white dwarfs has been established. The features of heavy elements in the spectra of a large fraction (25-50%) of these objects needs a frequent accretion of material orbiting close to the white dwarf. Additionally, at least 4% of these objects are known to host dusty disks. The space mission K2, that re-uses the Kepler instrument after a failure of two of its four gyroscopes, recently detected transiting material around WD1145+017, with periods in the 4.5-5h range, and a depth variability with scales of

NGC 1068 is the prototypical Seyfert 2 galaxy and a prime example for active galactic nuclei (AGN) unifying schemes. Its central engine is thought to be hidden behind a screen of obscuring material located in a dusty molecular torus of a few parsecs size. Given the distance to the galaxy (D ∼ 14 Mpc), it has been the subject of tens of studies aiming to disentangle what is happening in its central parsecs. We used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to map the emission of the CO(6–5) molecular line and the 432 μm continuum emission from the 300 pc sized circumnuclear disk (CND) of the