An international team of astronomers, co-led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has confirmed the presence of a new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. It is the third planet detected in this star and one of the lowest mass planets ever discovered, with only a quarter of the mass of the Earth. The study, published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, uses observations made with the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile. Proxima Centauri is the

The first data release of the SHARKS public survey, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), was provided to the astrophysical community today. This project, which has reached its first milestone, uses the 4-metre VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile to map large portions of the sky in the near-infrared, a range of the spectrum invisible to the human eye. The near-infrared wavelength range, a type of light imperceptible to the human eye, allows us to explore regions of the Universe that are obscured by cosmic dust or are too cold to

Professor Norbert Langer is currently head of the Stellar Physics Group at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie (Bonn, Germany). Considered one of the world’s leading experts in the field of theoretical stellar Astrophysics, for more than three decades he has been researching the evolution of high mass, from their early stages to the point when they explode as supernovae. These stars play an important role in the evolution of their host galaxies. However, their short lifetime makes them very difficult to observe, raising many questions about their nature. A correct interpretation of the

A recent study led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has resolved an old debate about the progenitor stars of the brightest planetary nebulae. The first author of this article, which has just been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is Rebeca Galera Rosillo, a doctoral student at the IAC who passed away in 2020 when she was finishing this work for her doctoral thesis. The first and most important datum needed to grasp the nature of the universe is to know its size, to measure the distance to the galaxies. Just as in the Renaissance people began