Press release

Published on August 20, 2019

A team of astronomers led by Anne-Marie Lagrange, a CNRS researcher at the Institut de planétologie et d’astrophysique de Grenoble (OSUG - CNRS/Université Grenoble Alpes), has discovered a second giant planet in orbit around b Pictoris, a star that is relatively young (23 million years old) and close (63.4 light years), and surrounded by a disk of dust.
The β Pictoris system has fascinated astronomers for the last thirty years since it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process (...)

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Published on May 10, 2019
Press release published by ESA

Small enough to be an aircraft carry-on, the Juventas spacecraft nevertheless has big mission goals. Once in orbit around its target body, Juventas will unfurl an antenna larger than itself, to perform the very first subsurface radar survey of an asteroid.
ESA’s proposed Hera mission for planetary defence will explore the twin Didymos asteroids, but it will not go there alone: it will also serve as mothership for Europe’s first two ‘CubeSats’ to travel into deep space.
CubeSats are (...)

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Published on March 29, 2019

Cutting-edge VLTI instrument reveals details of a storm-wracked exoplanet using optical interferometry
This result was announced today in a letter in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics by the GRAVITY Collaboration , in which they present observations of the exoplanet HR8799e using optical interferometry. The exoplanet was discovered in 2010 orbiting the young main-sequence star HR8799, which lies around 129 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus.
Today’s result, which (...)

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Published on March 25, 2019

By surveying the centre of our Galaxy, ESA’s XMM-Newton has discovered two colossal ‘chimneys’ funneling material from the vicinity of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole into two huge cosmic bubbles.
The giant bubbles were discovered in 2010 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: one stretches above the plane of the Milky Way galaxy and the other below, forming a shape akin to a colossal hourglass that spans about 50 000 light years – around half the diameter of the entire Galaxy. (...)

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Published on February 15, 2019

The Mars Exploration Rover landed successfully in 2004 on the red planet. These two rovers were initially build to operate 3 months on the Martian surface; fifteen years later NASA announced the termination of the mission, after losing contact with the last of the two rovers. A truly extraordinary voyage on the Martian surface has ended.
Still, Mars exploration roves on. The Curiosity rover (NASA) will celebrate its 7th years on Mars this summer, and continues its climb up the central (...)

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Published on January 28, 2019

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year’s Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system. In addition to being the first to explore Pluto, New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system.
New (...)

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Published on January 28, 2019

ESA’s star mapping mission, Gaia, has shown our Milky Way galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond.
The close encounter likely took place sometime in the past 300–900 million years. It was discovered because of the pattern of movement it has given to stars in the Milky Way disc – one of the major components of our Galaxy.
The pattern was revealed because Gaia not only accurately measures the positions of more than a (...)

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Published on January 28, 2019
This article has been published by L’Istituto nazionale di astrofisica (INAF)

The formation of planets and the origin of life are among the most intriguing questions for mankind. Using ALMA, an international group of astronomers, including researchers from the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG, UGA/CNRS) [1], have reported the first detection of formic acid towards the TW Hydrae protoplanetary disk, located at only 190 light years from our Sun. This result has been published the 16th july 2018 in Astrophysical journal letters.
Our current (...)

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Published on January 28, 2019
Press release published by ESO

While testing a new subsystem on the SPHERE planet-hunting instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers were able to capture dramatic details of the turbulent stellar relationship in the binary star R Aquarii with unprecedented clarity — even compared to observations from Hubble. This project involved researchers from IPAG / OSUG (CNRS, University Grenoble Alpes).
This spectacular image — the second instalment in ESO’s R Aquarii Week — shows intimate details of the dramatic stellar duo (...)

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Published on January 28, 2019
Press release published by ESO

ESO’s exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY instrument has added further evidence to the long-standing assumption that a supermassive black hole lurks in the centre of the Milky Way. New observations show clumps of gas swirling around at about 30% of the speed of light on a circular orbit just outside its event horizon — the first time material has been observed orbiting close to the point of no return, and the most detailed observations yet of material orbiting this close to a black hole.
ESO’s (...)

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