An international team of researchers is publishing in Nature the discovery of the microquasar M81 ULS-1, an ultraluminous source in the spiral galaxy M81, with data obtained with the Keck telescopes in 2010 and with the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) in 2015.

The meeting, in which personnel of the TIC of the Spanish universities and research centres are taking part, can be followed with streaming, and for the first time with 4k definition on the website http://www.rediris.es/jt/jt2015

Danny Steeghs is a Reader in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Warwick. His interests in astrophysics as a teenager led him to study for a Masters in Astrophysics at the University of Utrecht in his native country, followed by a PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. After spending some time at the University of Southampton as a Research Fellow, he spent 5 years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge USA, returning to Europe to take up a position at Warwick. Danny has established long-term collaborations with scientists at the Instituto de

An International team of scientists, which includes Ricardo Génova Santos of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canaries (IAC), has identified in the data from ESA’s Planck satellite a signal which represents half of the missing baryonic matter in the “Local Universe”, the set of galaxies close to the Milky Way. Using a variety of different observations, scientists had reached the conclusion that the normal (“baryonic”) matter formed in the early universe must make up 4% of the total matter in the universe, and the other 96% is composed of “ dark matter” (some 20%) and “ dark energy” (some

We are very sorry to inform you that Professor Rod Davies has left us. He was a magnificent colleague and a very dear person in the IAC. Emeritus Professor of the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) he was the Director of the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory of that University, and the scientist in charge of the British side of the “Tenerife Experiment” at the Teide Observatory.

Phil Charles is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) and has visiting professorships at the Universities of Oxford (United Kingdom) and Cape Town (South Africa). He was the Director of the South African Astronomical Observatory from 2004-11, during which time he was involved in the construction and commissioning of the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). His research has always involved ground- and space-based observations of cosmic X-ray sources, mostly X-ray binaries, where a compact object (white dwarf, neutron star or black hole) accretes matter