An international team of scientists, with the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a planet of the size of Neptune orbiting in rather more than a week around AU Microscopii, a young star a little over of 30 light years away, and surrounded by a disc of debris left over from its formation. The data were obtained with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (now retired from service). The Discovery is published today in Nature magazine. The finding in this system, abbreviated as AU Mic, will be a unique

Laser frequency combs (LFCs) are well on their way to becoming the next-generation calibration sources for precision astronomical spectroscopy. This development is considered key in the hunt for low-mass rocky exoplanets around solar-type stars whose discovery with the radial-velocity method requires cm/s Doppler precision. In order to prove such precise calibration with an LFC, it must be compared to another calibrator of at least the same precision. Being the best available spectrograph calibrator, this means comparing it to a second - fully independent - LFC. Here, we report on a test in

The first prototype of the Large-Size Telescope (LST) of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the LST-1, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma), has detected an emission of very high-energy gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star at the centre of the nebula of the same name. This observation confirms the successful operation of this telescope, which is being commissioned.

Elena Máñez Rodríguez, the Head of the Department of Economy, Knowledge and Employment of the Canary Government paid a visit this morning to the headquarters of the IAC in La Laguna, together with Carlos Andrés Navarro Martínez, the Director of the Canary Agency of Research, Innovation and the Information Society (ACIISI).

The International Scientific Committee (CCI for its Spanish initials) of the Canary Island Observatories offers the mechanism by which the institutions which are members to participate effectively in the decisión making which affects the operation of the telescopes. This morning the CCI has celebrated, in virtual form, the first of its two meetings per year, in which some thirty people took part.