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

UNDARK is a pioneering project led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) bringing together outstanding international institutions in the fields of astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. Funded for three years via the 'Widening' programme of the European Union, its objective is to tackle one of the major puzzles of contemporary physics: the dark universe. The major part of the Cosmos is composed by the so-called “dark universe”. Barely 18% of the total matter in the universe is made up of the elements in atoms with which we are familiar, while the remaining 82%, termed

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