Press release

Unexpected discoveries in protoplanetary disks observed with the James Webb Space Telescope

Published on March 31, 2025

Newly formed stars are accompanied by massive disks of gas and dust in which planets for in a few million years (or less).
The dust particles they contain, which form the building blocks of future planets, asteroids and comets, range in size from sub-micron, as found in the interstellar medium, to mm-sized pebbles and larger. To build ever larger solid particles, models indicate that it is crucial to strongly concentrate the dust in small volumes, which is likely achieved in disks through (…)

Quartz Discovered for the First Time on Mars by the Perseverance Rover, Confirming Ancient Water Circulation on the Red Planet

Published on February 28, 2025

An international research team, involving numerous French laboratories —including IPAG (OSUG - CNRS/UGA), the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics, and Cosmochemistry (CNRS/IRD/Sorbonne University), the Geology Laboratory of Lyon (CNRS/ENS Lyon/Univ. Claude Bernard/UJM Saint-Etienne), and the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (CNRS/CNES/University of Toulouse)—has just detected, thanks to NASA’s Perseverance rover, rocks that provide evidence of ancient water (…)

Astrophysicists reveal structure of 74 exocomet belts orbiting nearby stars in landmark survey

Published on January 20, 2025

Astrophysicists led by a team from Trinity have – for the first time – imaged a large number of exocomet belts around nearby stars, and the tiny pebbles within them. Crystal-clear images show light being emitted from millimetre-sized pebbles within the belts that orbit 74 nearby stars of a wide variety of ages – from those that are just emerging from birth to those in more mature systems like our own Solar System.
The REASONS (REsolved ALMA and SMA Observations of Nearby Stars) study marks (…)

Sleeping giant surprises Gaia scientists

Published on April 16, 2024
ESA press release

Wading through the wealth of data from ESA’s Gaia mission, scientists have uncovered a ‘sleeping giant’. A large black hole, with a mass of nearly 33 times the mass of the Sun, was hiding in the constellation Aquila, less than 2000 light-years from Earth. This is the first time a black hole of stellar origin this big has been spotted within the Milky Way. So far, black holes of this type have only been observed in very distant galaxies. The discovery challenges our understanding of how (…)

Discovery of a nascent planet in close orbit around a young star

Published on March 25, 2024

A study conducted by a team of scientists from the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG - CNRS / UGA) as part of the ERC SPIDI project Scientific local contacts [Jérôme Bouvier->jerom

Groundbreaking survey reveals secrets of planet birth around dozens of stars

Published on March 05, 2024

In a series of studies, a team of astronomers has shed new light on the fascinating and complex process of planet formation. The stunning images, captured using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, represent one of the largest ever surveys of planet-forming discs. The research brings together observations of more than 80 young stars that might have planets forming around them, providing astronomers with a wealth of data and unique insights into how (…)

Distant black hole mass measurement demonstrates the potential of GRAVITY+

Published on February 01, 2024

Astronomers have, for the first time, made a direct measurement of the mass of a distant black hole, one so far away that light from its surroundings took 11 billion years to reach us. The team, led by Taro Shimizu at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, involving scientists from IPAG, found the black hole, called J0920, to have a mass of about 320 million times that of the Sun. This achievement, described in a paper published today in Nature, has been made (…)

The disk with three rings making metal-rich planets

Published on January 09, 2024

How Earth and the Solar System were formed, is an age-old question of humankind. By studying the present state of our planet, scientists were able to trace back our planetary history to the very beginning. Now we know that Earth formed from the dust which encircled the newborn Sun 4.5 billion years ago. An alternative approach to study the origin of our globe is to observe planetary systems currently in the making around distant young stars. An international team of astronomers observed (…)

Weather report: Expect scattered, patchy clouds made up of silicates on planet VHS 1256 b

Published on March 29, 2023

To date, despite the huge number of exoplanet discoveries, the formation and properties of giant planets remains a mystery. Giant exoplanets sculpt young exoplanetary systems, and might determine whether smaller Earth-like planets could be capable of harboring life. The observation and characterization of the properties of young exoplanets is crucial (i) to help scientists to understand what giant exoplanets are made of, how they differ from Jupiter and Saturn, and (ii) how they formed.
In (…)

Polarized X-rays reveal shape, orientation of extremely hot matter around black hole

Published on November 10, 2022

Researchers’ recent observations of a stellar-mass black hole called Cygnus X-1 reveal new details about the configuration of extremely hot matter in the region immediately surrounding the black hole. Matter is heated to millions of degrees as it is pulled toward a black hole. This hot matter glows in X-rays. Researchers are using measurements of the polarization of these X-rays to test and refine models that describe how black holes swallow matter, becoming some of the most luminous (…)