Press release

Published on May 06, 2022
CNRS Press release

For the past thirty years, the star β Pictoris has fascinated astronomers because it enables them to observe a planetary system in the process of formation. It is made up of at least two young planets, and also contains comets, which were detected as early as 1987. These were the first comets ever observed around a star other than the Sun. Now, an international research team headed by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, CNRS researcher at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (CNRS/Sorbonne (…)

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Published on March 11, 2022

Scientists have precisely dated the Hiawatha impact crater, the first known impact crater buried under the Greenland Ice Sheet to 58 million years old – just a few million years younger than the impact that killed off the dinosaurs. The work (involving scientists from IGE & IPAG) led by researchers at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of Denmark, and the Globe Institute University of Copenhagen overturns previous suggestions that the impact may have (…)

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Published on January 27, 2022

Liquid water previously detected under Mars’ ice-covered south pole is probably just a dusty mirage, according to a new study of the red planet led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists in 2018 had thought they were looking at liquid water when they saw bright radar reflections under the polar cap. However, the new study published Jan. 24 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the reflections matched those of volcanic plains found all over the red (…)

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Published on January 14, 2022
NRAO Press release

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) made a rare detection of a likely stellar flyby event in the Z Canis Majoris (Z CMa) star system. An intruder—not bound to the system—object came in close proximity to and interacted with the environment surrounding the binary protostar, causing the formation of chaotic, stretched-out streams of dust and gas in the disk surrounding it. While such intruder-based (…)

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Published on December 14, 2021
ESO Press release

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI) has obtained the deepest and sharpest images to date of the region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The new images zoom in 20 times more than what was possible before the VLTI and have helped astronomers find a never-before-seen star close to the black hole. By tracking the orbits of stars at the centre of our Milky Way, the team has made the most precise measurement yet of the (…)

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Published on December 08, 2021
ESO Press release

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has captured an image of a planet orbiting b Centauri, a two-star system that can be seen with the naked eye. This is the hottest and most massive planet-hosting star system found to date, and the planet was spotted orbiting it at 100 times the distance Jupiter orbits the Sun. Some astronomers believed planets could not exist around stars this massive and this hot — until now. "Finding a planet around b Centauri was very (…)

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Published on December 03, 2021
Science Press Release

Ultra-light and super-fast
As far as extrasolar planets go, ‘GJ 367 b’ is a featherweight. With half the mass of Earth, the newly discovered planet is one of the lightest among the nearly 5000 exoplanets known today. It takes the extrasolar planet approximately eight hours to orbit its parent star. With a diameter of just over 9000 kilometres, GJ 367 b is slightly larger than Mars. The planetary system is located just under 31 light years from Earth and is thus ideal for further (…)

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Published on July 22, 2021

Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disc around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time. The observations will shed new light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
This image, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ([ALMA->https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/alma), in which ESO is a (…)

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Published on April 12, 2021

Concerto, a state-of-the-art spectrometer designed by a consortium of French laboratories, including the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, led by the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, is on its way to the Atacama Desert in Chile. It will be installed, from April 6th, at an altitude of more than 5000 meters on the Apex telescope. Unique in its kind, Concerto should allow scientists to better understand one of the crucial periods of the formation of the (…)

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Published on March 09, 2021

Reaching new heights with 100 consortium publications including the early exoplanet demographics release.
The SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exo-planet REsearch) planet imager over more than a decade to achieve unprecedented performances on sky and meet its scientific objectives. The Figure 1 shows key phases of this design and construction phase.
Following its first light in May 2014, SPHERE has been offered to the European community, and rapidly obtained breakthrough (…)

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