Artits's impression of system K2-106. Credits: Vincenzo Guido and Emilio Molinari. An international consortium of astronomers found an unusually dense extrasolar planet with 1.5 Earth-radii. This alien world, dubbed K2-106b, shows that planets around other stars have more extreme features than the rocky planets in the solar system. A relatively small radius, but a mass 8 times higher than that of Earth. The newly discovered planet K2-106 b surprises astronomers because it has a much...

An international team led by UNIGE, discovered that the GJ436b exoplanet, nicknamed «the comet-like exoplanet» because it evaporates like a comet, follows a very special elliptical orbit over the poles of its star. The discovery has been possible thanks to three observations of the transit of the planet (which occurs every 2.64 days) taken with the two high resolution spectrographs: HARPS (installed on the 3.6 m ESO telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory, Chile) and HARPS-N installed at...

The President of the Patronato of the Fundación Galileo Galilei INAF signed the appointment of Dr. Ennio Poretti. Dr. Poretti will be in charge as new Scientific Director of FGG starting today 1st December 2017, and as Administrative Responsible (Gerente) starting 1st January 2018, when Dr. Emilio Molinari will leave the Fundación after more than 9 years. A brief self description of Ennio Poretti follows. Born in Arconate, near Milano, in 1956. Amateur astronomer since 1974, obtained his...

CALL FOR PROPOSAL TNG & REM also featuring LONG/LARGE PROGRAMS, GTO and NOT-TIME AOT 37 (2018A) is now open for proposalsApplications for observing time for the period April 1st, 2018 - September 30th, 2018 are solicited and should be submitted byFriday, 17th November, 2017, 12:00 UT   This semester the available time offered at TNG via INAF-TAC is 58 nights.See at the bottom for a detailed schedule breakdown.See below for the additional 20 (twenty!) nights available at NOT...

A team of researchers largely from INAF discovers a millisecond pulsar that emits periodic pulses not only in the X-ray band but also as visible light, thus behaving as an actual cosmic lighthouse.   A team of researchers has discovered that a millisecond pulsar, PSR J1023+0038, emits 590 pulses of visible light every second. It is the first optical millisecond pulsar ever discovered. This result has been recently published by Nature Astronomy and was obtained thanks to observations made...

The AOT36/18A schedule and allocations are available online.

Ladies and Gentlemen, We are pleased to announce that the call for observing time at night time telescopes supported by the OPTICON Trans-National Access programme is now open. See http://www.astro-opticon.org/h2020/tna/call/index.html. The call will close on 31 August at 23.59UT exactly. The Horizon 2020 contract has added two new robotic telescopes, a requirement to support time domain astronomy which is defined as a science category in its own right and some changes to the rules on...

The Board (Patronato) of Fundación Galileo Galilei - INAF (FGG), manager of the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), invites applications for the position of Scientific Director and Administration Responsible of FGG. For detailed information, please download the Job Announcement