One of the biggest recent surprises in astronomy is the discovery that most stars like the Sun harbor a planet between the size of Earth and Neptune within the orbit of Mercury — sizes and orbits absent from our solar system. These ‘ super-Earths' and ` sub-Neptunes’ are the galaxy's most common planets, but their formation has been shrouded in mystery. Now, an international team of astronomers has found a crucial missing link. By weighing four newborn planets in the V1298 Tau system, they've captured a rare snapshot of worlds in the process of transforming into the galaxy's most common

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), through its Communication and Scientific Culture Unit (UC3) and in collaboration with the Museum of Science and the Cosmos (MCC), part of Tenerife Museums, publishes the astronomical events for the year 2026 in its traditional calendar. The year 2026 will be marked by a total solar eclipse on 12 August, which will not be visible from the Canary Islands, but will be 70 per cent partial. In addition, 2026 will see the arrival of new comets, meteor showers and other interesting astronomical events. The IAC's 2026 Calendar is illustrated with a

A new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics unveils a powerful way to determine the size of dark matter haloes—the massive, invisible structures that host galaxies—by simply measuring how large galaxies appear in deep astronomical images. Researchers Ignacio Trujillo and Claudio Dalla Vecchia, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), demonstrate that galaxy size can serve as a precise proxy for halo size, offering measurements up to six times more accurate than previous methods. Using the cutting-edge EAGLE cosmological simulations

The discovery, made in collaboration between the IAC Solar System Group and Light Bridges, reveals the rotation period of comet 3I/ATLAS The Two-metre Twin Telescope (TTT) has made a pioneering discovery in astronomy: the first detection of a jet of gas and dust and its periodic modulation in an interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS. The study, published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, provides the first evidence of localised activity from an interstellar nucleus, offering unique insight into the nature of a celestial body that formed outside our Solar System. An extraordinarily normal

A multidisciplinary team of astrophysicists, neuroscientists, engineers, and musicians has unveiled a pioneering method to “listen” to the structure of the human brain. Published in Nature Scientific Reports , the study presents the first higher-order sonification applied to structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. This technique involves transforming three-dimensional information about the brain into sound, taking into account the spatial relationships and complex structure of the data. To do this, mathematical tools originally developed to study the large-scale structure of the