An international scientific team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has identified a new super-Earth orbiting the star HD 176986, a K-type dwarf located about 91 light-years away. The finding, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, brings the number of known planets in this system to three and confirms the value of long-term observation campaigns for detecting small, wide-orbiting worlds. The observation campaign of HD 176986, an orange dwarf star or K-type star, slightly smaller than the Sun and located about 91 light-years away, has highlighted the

The Solar System research group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is participating in the international programme to keep a closet track of asteroid 2024 YR4. The aim is to determine its orbit with the highest possible precision before it stops being observable by ground based and satellite telescopes in April, and so improving our value of the probability that it will impact the Earth in 2032. In this context several telescopes of the Canary Observatories of the IAC are playing an outstanding role in this observing campaign: The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de

An international scientific team, led by the University of Warwick and involving the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics, has used the European Space Agency's Cheops satellite to discover that the planetary system around the star LHS 1903 challenges current planet formation theories with the unusual order of its planets. Surprisingly, the most distant outer planet might be rocky and seems to have formed later – in a different environment than the other planets around the star. The study is published in the prestigious journal Science. In our Solar System, the inner planets (Mercury to

An international team of researchers, including staff from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered a planetary nebula that destroyed its own planetary system, conserving the remaining fragments in the form of dust orbiting its central star. To date, more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars of all kinds and almost every stage of stellar evolution. However, while exoplanets have been discovered around white dwarfs – the final stage in the evolution of low- and intermediate-mass stars like the Sun, no exoplanets have been detected in the previous