Press release

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 (...)

Press release

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 (...)

Press release published by the CNRS

The astronomical instrument SPHERE, installed since 2014 on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, has made its first discovery of a planet around a star other than the Sun, known as an exoplanet.
Only a handful of the 3,600 exoplanets detected since 1995 have been observed directly in this way. With a mass between 6 and 12 times that of Jupiter, HIP65426b is a young massive planet orbiting around a bright star in rapid rotation, located in the (...)

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 (...)

Press release published on june 13, 2018 by the ESO and CNRS

Two independent teams of astronomers have used ALMA to uncover convincing evidence that three young planets are in orbit around the infant star HD 163296. Using a novel planet-finding technique, the astronomers identified three disturbances in the gas-filled disc around the young star : the strongest evidence yet that newly formed planets are in orbit there. These are considered the first planets to be discovered with ALMA.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has (...)

Press release published on July 2, 2018 by ESO

SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has captured the first confirmed image of a planet caught in the act of forming in the dusty disc surrounding a young star. The young planet is carving a path through the primordial disc of gas and dust around the very young star PDS 70. The data suggest that the planet’s atmosphere is cloudy.
Astronomers led by a group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany have captured a spectacular snapshot of (...)

Press release published by CNRS / CNES

Our Universe would be well constituted to 95% of matter and dark energy whose nature remains unknown.
In 2013, ESA’s Planck mission unveiled a new image of the cosmos : an all-sky survey of the microwave radiation produced at the beginning of the Universe. This first light emitted by the Universe provides a wealth of information about its content, its rate of expansion, and the primordial fluctuations in density that were the precursors of the galaxies. The Planck consortium publishes the (...)

Press release published by CNRS/UGA/Observatoire de Paris/Université Sorbonne/Université Paris Diderot

Observations of the Galactic Centre team at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein’s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way.
This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO’s telescopes in Chile.
Obscured by thick clouds of absorbing dust, the (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)