The exoplanet satellite hunter CHEOPS of the European Space Agency (ESA), in which the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating along with other European institutions, has unexpectedly detected a third planet passing in front of its star while it was exploring two previously known planets around the same star. This transit, according to researchers, will reveal exciting details about a strange planet “without a known equivalent”.
An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of galactic bulges. The researchers have been able to determine the mode of formation and development of these galactic structures. The results of this study were recently published in The Astrophysical
In recent years there has been an exhaustive study of red dwarf stars to find exoplanets in orbit around them. These stars have effective surface temperatures between 2400 and 3700 K (over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun), and masses between 0.08 and 0.45 solar masses. In this context, a team of researchers led by Borja Toledo Padrón, a Severo Ochoa-La Caixa doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), specializing in the search for planets around this type of stars, has discovered a super-Earth orbiting the star GJ 740, a red dwarf star situated some 36 light years
We present COSMIC BIRTH (COSMological Initial Conditions from Bayesian Inference Reconstructions with THeoretical models): an algorithm to reconstruct the primordial and evolved cosmic density fields from galaxy surveys on the light-cone. The displacement and peculiar velocity fields are obtained from forward modelling at different redshift snapshots given some initial cosmic density field within a Gibbs-sampling scheme. This allows us to map galaxies, observed in a light-cone, to a single high redshift and hereby provide tracers and the corresponding survey completeness in Lagrangian space
We detect a transiting rocky planet with an orbital period of 1.467 days around the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 486. The planet Gliese 486 b is 2.81 Earth masses and 1.31 Earth radii, a composition similar to that of Venus or Earth, as determined from exquisite radial velocity data and photometric light curves. The host star is at a distance of 26 light-years, very bright, and observable from both hemispheres of Earth. The stellar and planet properties indicate that despite the hot surface temperatures it is possible that the planet conserved part of its original atmosphere, making it an
During the past 25 years astronomers have discovered a wide variety of exoplanets, made of rock, ice and gas, thanks to the construction of astronomical instruments designed specifically for planet searches. Also, using a combination of different observing techniques they have been able to determine a large numher of masses, sizes, and hence densities of the planets, which helps them to estimate their internal composition and raising the number of planets which have been discovered outside the Solar System.
