An international piece of research, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has found clues to the nature of some of the brightest and hottest stars in our Universe, called blue supergiants. Although these stars are commonly observed, their origin has been an old puzzle that has been debated for several decades. By simulating novel stellar models and analysing a large data sample in the Large Magellanic Cloud, IAC researchers have found strong evidence that most blue supergiants may have formed from the merger of two stars bound in a binary system. The study is published in the

The team led by Claudia Gutiérrez from the ICE-CSIC and IEEC has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) and the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in La Palma. The CSS161010 burst reached its maximum brightness in just 4 days in a small galaxy 500 million light-years away from us. An international scientific team, led by the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) and the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), has managed to detect an exceptionally fast and bright cosmic burst in a small

The single star nearest to the Sun is called Barnard’s star. A team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has recently detected a ‘sub-Earth’ orbiting it. This exoplanet, called Barnard b has at least half the mass of Venus and orbits rapidly around its star, so that its year lasts only a little over three Earth days. This new exoplanet is sixteen times nearer to Barnard’d star than Mercury is to the Sun, and has a surface temperature close to 125oC, so it does not have liquid water on its surface. This discovery, led by the IAC in collaboration with a number