An international team, led by a researcher from the University of Liège (Belgium) affiliated to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered an extraordinarily light planet orbiting a distant star in our galaxy. This discovery, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy, is a promising key to solving the mystery of how such giant, super-light planets form. The new planet, named WASP-193b, appears to dwarf Jupiter in size, yet it is a fraction of its density. The scientists found that the gas giant is 50 percent bigger than Jupiter, and about a tenth as dense — an

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