Researchers Julia de León and Javier Licandro of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) are participating in the Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) , successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) on 7th October at 14:52 UTC. This is the first European mission for planetary defence which together with NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid redirection Test) will study the effects of a technique for diverting asteroids called “ kinetic impactor”. The DART probe crashed into the smaller ( Dimorphos) of the two asteroids which form the binary system Didymos, on September

An international team, led by a student from Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has detected a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of GJ 3998, a nearby red dwarf located 59 ly away. The new planet, named GJ 3998 d, is the third planet found in the system. ‘GJ 3998 d is a welcome addition to the planetary census of our cosmic neighbourhood’, states Atanas Stefanov, a "La Caixa" funded PhD student at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the study’s lead author, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics . 'This super-Earth appears to be in the habitable zone of one of

The IACTEC headquarters has recently hosted the meeting between the engineering team behind the future European Solar Telescope and an international panel composed of some of the world's leading experts in the development of large telescopes and solar observation instrumentation. It is common for major scientific projects to undergo this type of scrutiny during their development as a way to independently verify their quality and viability. The evaluation process began over a month ago with the submission of all the design documentation to the reviewers. In this case, the evaluation focused