There are many oscillatory phenomena in the Sun which show up from the deepest interior layers to the outermost layers of its atmosphere. The study of these waves is a fundamental problem in solar physics, since they are one of the candidates proposed to explain the high temperatures measured in the chromosphere and the corona of the Sun, and they are used to characterize the structure of the Sun using seismological analyses. In this work we have studied wave propagation in sunspots. Sunspots are caused by strong concentrations of magnetic field, visible on the solar disc as dark regions

We present an analysis of the UVES high-resolution spectroscopic observations at the 8.2m VLT of J0023+0307, an extremely iron-poor dwarf star. We are unable to detect iron lines in the spectrum but derive [Fe/H]< −6.1 from the Ca II resonance lines assuming [Ca/Fe]=0.40. The chemical abundance pattern of J0023+0307, with very low [Fe/Mg] and [Ca/Mg] abundance ratios, but relatively high absolute Mg and Si abundances, suggests J0023+0307 is a second generation star formed from a molecular cloud polluted by only one supernova in which the fall-back mechanism played a role. We measure a carbon

Towards the end of their lives some 95% of stars evolve into red giants which lose their mass via a “stellar wind”. Eventually they end up as planetary nebulae, ionized gas with a central hot star, a white dwarf. Here we report ALMA data on massive red giant (asymptotic giant branch, AGB) stars, displaying a spiral structure which show that these stars are not individual and have a binary companion. This offers an alternative explanation to the high rates of mass loss which it was thought were present towards the end of the lives of the most massive AGB stars. We show that these stars lose

The Catholic University of Louvain, in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and the University of La Laguna, leads the first Asteroseismological study of high mass stars, using NASA telescopes.

Last Monday the GTC observed the asteroid 2019 DS1 in the context of a collaborative programme between the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) in which researchers from the Solar System group at the IAC are participating.

The OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) has discovered, on the spiral galaxy Messier 106, a system of globular clusters whose unusual distribution and motion, wich could be a relic from the the “cosmic noon”.