The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) has confirmed the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of HD 20794, a nearby Sun-like star. This discovery, the result of over two decades of observations, opens a window to future studies of Earth-like planetary atmospheres. The search for planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars is crucial for understanding the possibility of life beyond Earth and for studying conditions similar to those that enabled the development of life on our own planet. In this context, HD 20794, a star

Massive stars in metal-poor galaxies often have close partners, just like the massive stars in our metal-rich Milky Way. This has been discovered by an international scientific team in which research staff from the Instituto de Aastrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL) participate. They used the European Very Large Telescope in Chile to monitor the velocity of massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The research is published in Nature Astronomy . For the past twenty years, astronomers have known that many massive stars in the metal-rich Milky Way have a

One of the biggest recent surprises in astronomy is the discovery that most stars like the Sun harbor a planet between the size of Earth and Neptune within the orbit of Mercury — sizes and orbits absent from our solar system. These ‘ super-Earths' and ` sub-Neptunes’ are the galaxy's most common planets, but their formation has been shrouded in mystery. Now, an international team of astronomers has found a crucial missing link. By weighing four newborn planets in the V1298 Tau system, they've captured a rare snapshot of worlds in the process of transforming into the galaxy's most common