In this roadmap article, we consider the main challenges and recent breakthroughs in understanding the role of carbon molecular nanostructures in space and propose future avenues of research. The focus lies on small carbon-containing molecules up to fullerenes, extending to even larger, more complex organic species. The roadmap contains forty

Red supergiant (RSG) stars represent the final evolutionary phase of the majority of massive stars and hold a unique role in testing the physics of stellar models. Eighty-eight RSGs in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) were recently found to have an ultraviolet (UV) excess, which was attributed to a B-type companion. We present follow-up Hubble

The steady-state gamma-ray emission from the Sun is thought to consist of two emission components due to interactions with Galactic cosmic rays: (1) a hadronic disk component, and (2) a leptonic extended component peaking at the solar edge and extending into the heliosphere. The flux of these components is expected to vary with the 11 yr solar

We present new K-band spectroscopy for the giant elliptical galaxy M87 in the Virgo cluster, taken with the Large Binocular Telescope Utility Camera in the Infrared (LUCI) spectrograph at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). The new data are used to study line strengths of K-band absorption features from different chemical species, namely Fe, Mg

Context. The Near-InfraRed Planet Searcher (NIRPS) is a high-resolution, high-stability near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph equipped with an adaptive optics (AO) system. Installed on the ESO 3.6-m telescope at La Silla Observatory, Chile, it was developed to enable radial velocity (RV) measurements of low-mass exoplanets around M dwarfs and to

Context. Near-infrared high-resolution échelle spectrographs unlock access to fundamental properties of exoplanets, from their atmospheric escape and composition to their orbital architecture, which can all be studied simultaneously from transit observations. Aims. We present the first results of the newly commissioned ESO near-infrared