An international team of scientists, with participation by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a very large, but thin, stream of stars in the Coma cluster of galaxies. This is the largest stream of stars detected until now, and the first to be found in a cluster of galaxies. This finding, which is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was made using observations taken with the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma, Canary Islands). The Coma Cluster is a large cluster of galaxies

An international collaboration, with participation by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a system of six exoplanets orbiting a central star with a precise rhythm.This phenomenon, known as orbital resonance, is common during the starting phase of planet formation, but it is exceptional to find a system with such a large set of planets which conserves this kind of gravitational synchronism. This finding shows that the system has not undergone major changes during its six billion year history, so that it gives an unusual view of the formation and evolution of planets. The

An international research team, led from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) together with a group of Italian universities, has confirmed a new method for finding protoclusters of galaxies, the largest structures in the early universe. These progenitors of present-day clusters of galaxies played an essential role in the evolution of the universe, but are not easy to find. This study shows that a specific type of galaxies, those which emit radiation at submillimetre wavelengths, are very good indicators of the presence of distant protoclusters

An international team of scientists, with participation by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) have found a barred spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, in the early universe, when it was only 15% as old as it is now. The galaxy, ceers-2112, is the most distant barred spiral observed, and its existence poses a challege to the current model of formation and evolution of galaxies. The discovery, made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is published in the journal Nature. In astrophysics studying the structure of galaxies