On January 7, 2025, the European Commission established the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), furthering its mission to become the world’s largest and most powerful observatory for gamma-ray astronomy. The creation of the CTAO ERIC will enable the Observatory's construction to advance rapidly and provide a framework for distributing its data worldwide, significantly accelerating its progress toward scientific discovery. “The ERIC will streamline the construction and operation of the Observatory in a way that will undoubtedly

An international team, led by a student from Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has detected a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of GJ 3998, a nearby red dwarf located 59 ly away. The new planet, named GJ 3998 d, is the third planet found in the system. ‘GJ 3998 d is a welcome addition to the planetary census of our cosmic neighbourhood’, states Atanas Stefanov, a "La Caixa" funded PhD student at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL) and the study’s lead author, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics . 'This super-Earth appears to be in the habitable zone of one of

A team of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), collaborating with other international institutions, has managed to find new galaxies in the Spiderweb protocluster. This was possible thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is a project of the space agencies of the United States (NASA), Europe (ESA) and Canada (CSA). Exploring the populations of galaxies, and discovering their physical properties in large scale structures helps astronomers to understand galaxy formation and how their assembly is determined by their environment. The “ Spiderweb” protocluster