The distribution of planets in the over five thousand distant solar systems discovered to date forms a complex puzzle. There is a region in the planetary orbit graph, known as the " Neptunian desert", where very few Neptune-like planets with orbits of between two and four days period around their star have been recorded to date. Now, a scientific team led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IAA-CSIC) , using a novel technique, new planets around red dwarf stars located precisely in

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

Researchers Julia de León and Javier Licandro of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) are participating in the Hera mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) , successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) on 7th October at 14:52 UTC. This is the first European mission for planetary defence which together with NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid redirection Test) will study the effects of a technique for diverting asteroids called “ kinetic impactor”. The DART probe crashed into the smaller ( Dimorphos) of the two asteroids which form the binary system Didymos, on September