Astronomers using the William Herschel Telescope find that there may be a cosmic lack of a chemical element essential to life, phosphorus, from observations of the Crab Nebula where they unexpectedly find very little. If this element is lacking in other parts of the cosmos, then it could be difficult for extra-terrestrial life to exist.

A rare encounter between two gas-rich galaxies indicates a solution to the problem of how giant elliptical galaxies developed so quickly in the early universe and why they stopped producing stars soon after.

Astronomers of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES) project announce today in the journal Nature the discovery of an unsually massive, maximum-starburst galaxy at a redshift of 6.34, or when the Universe was only 880 million years old. Because current theories of galaxy fomation and evolution predict smaller galaxies with slower rates of star production in the early Universe, the detection of such a galaxy is challenging.

The role of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the formation and evolution of galaxies is still not well established. Some authors claim that AGN are key in quenching star formation in their host galaxies through so-called AGN feedback, which has been invoked to explain the well-established correlations between supermassive-black-hole (SMBH) mass and host-galaxy properties. In order to understand the importance of AGN feedback in the star-formation histories of galaxies, it is necessary to study how the star formation rate (SFR) in active galaxies evolves with redshift.

From spectra collected during the August 2008 lunar eclipse, astronomers have been able to investigate the in-transit signature of the Earth-Sun system as would be observed from outside the solar system. They found that the refraction of sunlight as it passes through a planetary atmosphere similar to the Earths contributes prominently to the in-transit transmission spectrum. This research has important implications for future attempts to characterise the atmospheres of Earth-like extrasolar planets, especially those in similar long-period orbits.

A group of astronomers from the IAC and CEFCA have reported the discovery of a massive stellar cluster in the Milky Way. The discovery is part of the MASGOMAS project (MAssive Stars in Galactic Obscured MAssive clusterS), a systematic search for massive galactic stellar clusters. The massive nature of the cluster has been confirmed using LIRIS imaging, and long-slit and multi-object spectroscopy, on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT).

As we get closer to finding analogues of Earth, an important consideration for the characterization of extrasolar planetary atmospheres is what the transmission spectrum of our planet looks like. Recently a team of astronomers, using LIRIS on the William Herschel Telescope and ALFOSC on the Nordic Optical Telescope simultaneously, have been able to obtain for the first time the optical and near-infrared transmission spectrum of the Earth during a lunar eclipse.

The WHT makes the first ever ground-based near-infrared detection of an extrasolar planet. TrES-3b, as it is called, is just a little larger than Jupiter, yet orbits around its parent star much closer than Mercury does, making it a "hot jupiter". As the planet disappears behind the star, the light coming from the whole system decreases because of the absence of the planets light, allowing astronomers precise measurements of the light emitted by the planet. This way of detecting direct light coming from an extrasolar planet is also referred as the secondary eclipse method.

A deep infrared survey of the young sigma Orionis open cluster using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope has revealed that brown dwarfs and isolated planetary-mass objects may share the same origin.

A search for low-mass brown dwarfs in the Pleiades open cluster has led to the identification of the least massive cluster members: BRB 28 and 29 have masses of the order of 25 Jupiter masses

When comet Tempel 1 came into view from La Palma, some 16 hours after the NASA Deep Impact probe struck the comet, members of the La Palma Deep Impact Collaborating Observers team were able to start tracking the target comet with the 2.5m Isaac Newtow Telescope.

The spectrum of SN 2004ao shows a set of broad emission bands superimposed on a quite flat continium, indicating that the supernova was close to reach the nebular phase at the date of the observations.