Press release

How to feed a baby star

Published on September 08, 2020
Gas reaches young stars along magnetic field lines

IPAG Astronomers have used the GRAVITY instrument to study the immediate vicinity of a young star in more detail than ever before. Their observations confirm a thirty-year-old theory about the growth of young stars: the magnetic field produced by the star itself directs material from a surrounding accretion disk of gas and dust onto its surface. The results, published today in the journal Nature, help astronomers to better understand how stars like our Sun are formed and how Earth-like (...)

Rainbow comet with a heart of sponge

Published on September 07, 2020
Press release published by ESA

A permeable heart with a hardened facade –the resting place of Rosetta’s lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is revealing more about the interior of the ’rubber duck’ shaped-body looping around the Sun. A recent study suggests that the comet’s interior is more porous than the material near the surface. The results confirm that solar radiation has significantly modified the comet’s surface as it travels through space between the orbits of Jupiter and Earth. Heat from the Sun triggers an (...)

Astronomers Find Elusive Target Hiding Behind Dust

Published on June 08, 2020

Astronomers acting on a hunch have likely resolved a mystery about young, still-forming stars and regions rich in organic molecules closely surrounding some of them. They used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to reveal one such region that previously had eluded detection, and that revelation answered a longstanding question.
The regions around the young protostars contain complex organic molecules that can further combine into prebiotic molecules that (...)

ESO Telescope Sees Signs of Planet Birth

Published on May 25, 2020

Observations made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed the telltale signs of a star system being born. Around the young star AB Aurigae lies a dense disc of dust and gas in which astronomers have spotted a prominent spiral structure with a ‘twist’ that marks the site where a planet may be forming. The observed feature could be the first direct evidence of a baby planet coming into existence. A study including IPAG
“Thousands of exoplanets (...)

Astronomers capture rare images of planet-forming disks around stars

Published on April 30, 2020

An international team of astronomers including researchers from the Grenoble Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics (OSUG - CNRS, UGA), has captured fifteen images of the inner rims of planet-forming disks located hundreds of light years away. These disks of dust and gas, similar in shape to a music record, form around young stars. The images shed new light on how planetary systems are formed. The results were published on April 30 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. To (...)

New simulations reveal black-hole jet ignition secrets

Published on April 21, 2020

Jets, which are powerful collimated outflows, are routinely observed as being launched from black holes, yet their origin has remained elusive for decades. New computer simulations reveal for the first time the mechanisms of their ignition. These results have been published in the Physical Review Letters on April 6th 2020.
It has long been thought that the rotation of the black hole is the source of jet power, acting like an electric motor driving currents. However, how the plasma carrying (...)

ESO Telescope Sees Star Dance Around Supermassive Black Hole, Proves Einstein Right

Published on April 16, 2020

Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), involving IPAG / OSUG [1], have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton’s theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measurements over nearly 30 years, which have enabled (...)

Multiple nitrogen reservoirs in a protoplanetary disk at the epoch of comet and giant planet formation

Published on December 11, 2019

The Solar System shows extreme nitrogen isotopic heterogeneity, with the 14N/15N ratio ranging from 440 in the Sun and Jupiter down to values as low as 50 in some grains within chondritic matrices. Remarkably, comets exhibit a universal 14N/15N ratio of 140, regardless of the cometary orbit type or the carrier in nitrogen. Evolved protoplanetary disks offer unique possibilities for studying the diversity of nitrogen reservoirs in contexts similar to the Solar System at the epoch of planet (...)

First detection of very high energy gamma-ray bursts

Published on December 02, 2019

The most violent cosmic explosions in the Universe give rise to gamma-ray bursts, very short yet highly energetic flashes of photons. Two of them have now exceeded the highest energy levels ever observed until now, confirming that these gamma-ray emissions can reach energy levels at least a trillion times higher than that of visible light.
The observations provide, for the first time, evidence of the presence in gamma-ray bursts of particles accelerated to extreme energies. They also show (...)

Zeroing in on baby exoplanets could reveal how they form

Published on November 19, 2019

Twenty-four years ago, Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system – a milestone recognised by this year’s Nobel prize in physics. Today we know of thousands more ‘exoplanets’, and researchers are now trying to understand when and how they form.