One hundred and fifty experts in Solar and Stellar Seismology from over twenty countries will converge on Lanzarote from the 1st to the 5th February for the 4th HELAS International Conference, organised by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)

ESA's Herschel Space Observatory was launched on 14 May 2009. After a short commissioning and performance verification period, the science demonstration observations started in September 2009. Herschel is now carrying out routine science observations. The three instruments (SPIRE, PACS and HIFI) are working extremely well. The IAC is part of the SPIRE and PACS instrument consortia and has contributed flying hardware and software. The first results of the many Herschel Key Projects were presented at the ESLAB 2010 symposium in ESTEC (May 2010) and have been published in July 2010 in a special

The Gran Telescopio CANARIAS open new prospects to characterise the oldest population of stars in our Galaxy with the discovery of a cold and distant low-metallicity star A new object with an age of thousands of millions of years and a mass of one tenth of the Sun, placing it at the frontier between low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, has been discovered as the furthest of its class in Milky Way. Nicknamed ULAS1350, this subdwarf could become on of the key element to improve our knowledge on the first steps of the formation of our Galaxy.The team of European astronomers responsible for the

A long-standing issue in solar astrophysics concerns the strength and structure variations with height of the magnetic field in the chromosphere of the quiet Sun. Our empirical knowledge on this issue has remained vague notwithstanding the qualitative information provided by high resolution monochromatic images of the solar atmosphere taken at various wavelengths across strong spectral lines like H-alpha showing a mass of cell-spanning fibrils as a flattened carpet, with upright ones jutting out from network patches. Unfortunately, such images do not provide quantitative information on the

Recent observations of the rotation curve of M31 show a rise of the outer part that cannot be understood in terms of standard dark matter models or perturbations of the galactic disk by M31?s satellites. Here, we propose an explanation of this dynamical feature based on the in?uence of the magnetic ?eld within the thin disk. We have considered standard mass models for the luminous mass distribution, a Navarro?Frenk?White model to describe the dark halo, and we have added up the contribution to the rotation curve of a magnetic ?eld in the disk, which is described by an axisymmetric pattern

We present a visual determination of the number of bright points (BPs) existing in the quiet Sun, which are structures thought to trace intense kG magnetic concentrations. The measurement is based on a 0farcs1 angular resolution G-band movie obtained with the Swedish Solar Telescope at the solar disk center. We find 0.97 BPs Mm-2, which is a factor 3 larger than any previous estimate. It corresponds to 1.2 BPs per solar granule. Depending on the details of the segmentation, the BPs cover between 0.9% and 2.2% of the solar surface. Assuming their field strength to be 1.5 kG, the detected BPs