IAC researcher David Aguado has obtained a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), aimed at promoting promising young scientists. This is the third ERC grant -one of the most competitive and recognized of the Horizon Europe program- that the center has received so far this year, thus consolidating its international projection. These highly competitive grants provide up to €1.5 million over five years to support outstanding young scientists in establishing their own independent research groups and pursuing pioneering scientific ideas. Searching for the first stars

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has successfully completed the integration of the scientific detector into the FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for Adaptive Optics) instrument, an integra-field camera and spectrograph designed to work with the adaptive optics system of the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC or Grantecan), the world's largest optical and infrared telescope, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma. The integration was carried out in the laboratories of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City by a team from the IAC

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the University of Liège and collaborators in UK, Chile, the USA, and Europe, has discovered a transiting giant planet orbiting the smallest known star to host such a companion — a finding that defies current theories of planet formation. The host star, TOI-6894 , is a red dwarf with only 20% the mass of the Sun , typical of the most common stars in our galaxy. Until now, such low-mass stars were not thought capable of forming or retaining giant planets. But as published today in