Press release

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 (…)

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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 (…)

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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.

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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 (…)

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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, (…)

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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 (…)

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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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