Next Tuesday, September 22nd, at 13:30 UT the Earth will be at a specific point in its orbit round the Sun: the September equinox. The September and March equinoxes are the only days in the year when the Sun rises exactly in the east and sets exactly in the west, across the whole planet.

With data from NASA’s TESS satellite, from the now retired Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) an international team of astronomers, with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has detected what appears to be an intact planet in orbit around a white dwarf, the dense remains of a star similar to the Sun , and only 40 % bigger in diameter than the Earth. This finding is published today in Nature magazine.

After several months of waiting, this summer the EELabs project, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, has started to deploy its first network of photometers.

It is 25 years, now, since the astrophysicists Rafael Rebolo, María Rosa Zapatero-Osorio and Eduardo Marín announced the discovery of the first confirmed brown dwarf, Teide 1. It is in the Pleiades star cluster, and it is named after the Teide Observatory, from where it was observed for the first time with the Spanish IAC-80 telescope. It is one of the scientific landmarks with the greatest international impact obtained by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) will be collaborating for the third successive year with the Spanish-American Writers’ Festival which will be celebrated from September 14th to 19th in Los Llanos de Aridane (La Palma). The programme of this third edition, in which almost 40 writers and a small group of meta-writers (editors, journalists and critics) will participate, will consist of 35 sessions. Among them we can pick out panel sessions on a variety of themes, autographs of examples by some of the authors involved, and activities aimed at the younger generation whose schools

An international team of researchers, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the existence of resonant cavities above sunspots. These results, recently published in two articles in the journals Nature Astronomy and The Astrophysical Journal Letters, have settled a debate lasting several decades about the nature of the waves in the active regions of the Sun. Sunspots are darker regions which often appear on the Sun’s surface. They are caused by strong concentrations of magnetic field, and can be as big as the Earth, or even much bigger. From the end of the 1960’s