Recently, astrophysicists have studied the configuration of a planetary system (Kepler 107) discovered with the NASA Kepler mission, which was looking for exoplanets outside our Solar System. The planetary system Kepler 107 is constituted of a star similar to the Sun though slightly more massive and four planets orbiting around it. The detailed analysis of the configuration of the planets, in particular their densities, showed that the closest planet is not the densest, which is what is expected from the planet formation theory. Using some simulations, one of the most plausible explanation

A visit to the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory with the students of the Santo Domingo secondary school, and a public lecture about the new generation of cherenkov telescopes which will study the most energetic phenomena in the universe from this municipality in La Palma, are among the activities to be carried out on May 16th.

We present an analysis of the UVES high-resolution spectroscopic observations at the 8.2m VLT of J0023+0307, an extremely iron-poor dwarf star. We are unable to detect iron lines in the spectrum but derive [Fe/H]< −6.1 from the Ca II resonance lines assuming [Ca/Fe]=0.40. The chemical abundance pattern of J0023+0307, with very low [Fe/Mg] and [Ca/Mg] abundance ratios, but relatively high absolute Mg and Si abundances, suggests J0023+0307 is a second generation star formed from a molecular cloud polluted by only one supernova in which the fall-back mechanism played a role. We measure a carbon

There are many oscillatory phenomena in the Sun which show up from the deepest interior layers to the outermost layers of its atmosphere. The study of these waves is a fundamental problem in solar physics, since they are one of the candidates proposed to explain the high temperatures measured in the chromosphere and the corona of the Sun, and they are used to characterize the structure of the Sun using seismological analyses. In this work we have studied wave propagation in sunspots. Sunspots are caused by strong concentrations of magnetic field, visible on the solar disc as dark regions

Last week, the founder of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, one of whose telescopes is at the Teide Observatory (Tenerife), paid a visit to the Headquarters of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in La Laguna, and to the Canary Island Observatories, on the heights of Tenerife and La Palma.

Towards the end of their lives some 95% of stars evolve into red giants which lose their mass via a “stellar wind”. Eventually they end up as planetary nebulae, ionized gas with a central hot star, a white dwarf. Here we report ALMA data on massive red giant (asymptotic giant branch, AGB) stars, displaying a spiral structure which show that these stars are not individual and have a binary companion. This offers an alternative explanation to the high rates of mass loss which it was thought were present towards the end of the lives of the most massive AGB stars. We show that these stars lose