An International team of scientists, which includes Ricardo Génova Santos of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canaries (IAC), has identified in the data from ESA’s Planck satellite a signal which represents half of the missing baryonic matter in the “Local Universe”, the set of galaxies close to the Milky Way. Using a variety of different observations, scientists had reached the conclusion that the normal (“baryonic”) matter formed in the early universe must make up 4% of the total matter in the universe, and the other 96% is composed of “ dark matter” (some 20%) and “ dark energy” (some

Danny Steeghs is a Reader in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Warwick. His interests in astrophysics as a teenager led him to study for a Masters in Astrophysics at the University of Utrecht in his native country, followed by a PhD at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. After spending some time at the University of Southampton as a Research Fellow, he spent 5 years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge USA, returning to Europe to take up a position at Warwick. Danny has established long-term collaborations with scientists at the Instituto de

We are very sorry to inform you that Professor Rod Davies has left us. He was a magnificent colleague and a very dear person in the IAC. Emeritus Professor of the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) he was the Director of the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory of that University, and the scientist in charge of the British side of the “Tenerife Experiment” at the Teide Observatory.

Elizabeth Ferrara is the Deputy Lead Scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s Science Support Center. In addition to science, she provides help to scientists just starting to use Fermi data. She also provides science outreach for the mission, bringing the accomplishments, discoveries, and capabilities of the observatory to the greater scientific community. Finally, as professional faculty at the University of Maryland, she occasionally teaches data analysis methods to students

Phil Charles is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) and has visiting professorships at the Universities of Oxford (United Kingdom) and Cape Town (South Africa). He was the Director of the South African Astronomical Observatory from 2004-11, during which time he was involved in the construction and commissioning of the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). His research has always involved ground- and space-based observations of cosmic X-ray sources, mostly X-ray binaries, where a compact object (white dwarf, neutron star or black hole) accretes matter

Julien Malzac works at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse in the south of France, where he holds a Research Scientist position funded by the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). He graduated in Physics at the Université de Bordeaux (France) and then obtained a PhD in Astrophysics from the Université de Toulouse. After that he worked for several years as a posdoc at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Milan (Italy) and then at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge (United Kingdom)