An Italian research team has precisely characterized the mass and orbital parameters of HD 72659 c, an exoplanet located in the so-called “brown dwarf desert”, by combining data from HARPS-N (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher – Northern Hemisphere) installed at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), astrometric measurements from Gaia (ESA), direct imaging from SPHERE on the Very Large Telescope in Chile and data from literature.

The Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (La Palma), did not miss the opportunity to observe the new interstellar object whose discovery was announced on July 1, 2025. This visitor, named 3I/ATLAS, follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, 1I/‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2017 and 2019. Like them, it was detected on its journey toward the Sun, on a hyperbolic orbit at high speed (about 60 km/s) when it was still 3.3 AU from our star (about 495 million km). Shortly after the announcement of its discovery by the ATLAS telescopes, its cometary nature was confirmed thanks to the coma surrounding its bright nucleus.

A new study from the Stellar Population Astrophysics (SPA) project at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) presents a homogeneous high-resolution spectroscopic analysis of 95 giant stars across 33 open clusters in the Milky Way. Observations were carried out using HARPS-N, the TNG's high-precision spectrograph, enabling the determination of accurate non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) atmospheric parameters and elemental abundances.