2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the inauguration fo the TNG. We want to celebrate 2026 going back in time to the year of inauguration, when everything began, and remember some of the main events of 1996. How old were you in 1996? How many of these events do you remember? The TNG CalendarStars of 2026 is a time machine that will take you back to scientific, cultural and funny events.

Thanks to observations carried out with the high resolution spectrograph HARPS-N at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), astronomers have characterized the rare exoplanet named TOI-3862 b. The planet, with a radius of approximately 0.8 Jupiter radii and an unusually high density of ~ 1.7 g cm^-3, resides in the so-called hot Neptune desert, a region where Neptune-sized planets are scarce despite their relative detectability.

Thanks to data coming from the high resolution spectrograph HARPS-N installed at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo and the GAIA mission, an international team has characterized a rare substellar object with an exceptionally eccentric orbit. As part of the Global Architecture of Planetary Systems (GAPS) program, a team of researchers led by Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) has confirmed and precisely characterized a new substellar companion orbiting the star HD 128717, located in the constellation Draco. The object, now named Gaia-6 B, is a brown dwarf with a mass about 20 times that of Jupiter. The discovery is particularly notable because Gaia-6 B is moving in an extremely eccentric orbit, one of the most "squashed" ever measured for an object of this mass. The celestial body completes one revolution around its parent star in about 9.37 years.