The Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) is a 10 m-class telescope which is under construction and will be operational at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos at the end of 2003. The goal of this paper is to describe the current status of the design and construction of the primary, secondary and tertiary mirrors of the GTC and their opto

Numerous planetary candidates have been detected on nearby G and K dwarfs by high precision radial velocity measurements. The sensitivity to the planet detection by astrometric surveys is very different from the radial velocity searches. Discussions about current results on the detection of extra- solar planets and the impacts of these detections

Rayleigh scattering produced in the lower atmosphere by laser launched from the ground, could be very relevant for performances of Laser Guide Stars systems and for light contamination measurements in other close telescopes. We have studied the scattering above Teide Observatory (Canary Islands) produced by a potassium laser. We show measurements

The abundance of Li in stars formed within the past 5 Gyr is logN(Li)=3.2(+/-0.2), while the corresponding value for the oldest stars in the Galaxy is logN(Li)=2.2(+/-0.2). The global evidence suggests that the latter represents the full, or the major, part of the primordial abundance, so that the difference of an order of magnitude is due to Li

Hierarchical clustering scenarios for galaxy formation predict that dwarf galaxies are the first to be formed and that they are building blocks of larger galaxies. We propose here to measure the spatial structure and the stellar age and metallicity distribution of the Phoenix dwarf galaxy to give support or reject such scenarios. The kind of

The PSF of a segmented mirror telescope is hardly affected by the segments alignment and it can cancel the performances of the Adaptive Optics Systems. The piston and tilt of each segment must be uniformly adjusted in relation to the rest of the segments. Furthermore, the direct detection of the alignment error with natural stars would be desirable