The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) welcomed the visit of Professor Didier Queloz, Nobel Laureate in Physics and co-discoverer of the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star. Professor Queloz's stay at the IAC has focused on instrumental development and technological collaboration. As part of his agenda, he also gave a lecture entitled ‘Exoplanets: the next frontier’ in the IAC Lecture Hall. The researcher visited the IAC to supervise the installation of a new high-stability spectrograph on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma

The international BEARD project, led from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), has used data from several telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, and computer simulations to explain how galaxies similar to the Milky Way have managed to survive the most violent stages of the history of the Universe. The present model for the evolution of the universe predicts an epoch dominated by important mergers of galaxies some ten thousand million years ago. “It’s a case of violent interactions, in which it is foreseeable that weak structures