news 2018

Paris, December 5, 2018 Researchers from the CNRS 1 and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) have prepared the first global map of the distribution of atmospheric ammonia (NH3) by analyzing measurements taken by satellites between 2008 and 2016. The IASI interferometer developed by the CNES allowed them to catalog more than 200 ammonia sources, two-thirds of which had never been identified before.

Paris, 29 November 2018 Scientists have revealed, for the first time outside our Galaxy, the properties of rapidly moving gas clouds in the immediate vicinity of a super-massive black hole, enabling the mass of the black hole to be measured with unprecedented accuracy.

Parker Solar Probe will soon become the spacecraft to travel the closest to the Sun, by positioning itself a little over 6 million kilometers from our star's surface. During its journey within the solar corona, the NASA probe will notably have an on-board instrument developed by researchers from the CNRS, université d'Orléans, and the CNES.

Observations made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have, for the first time, detected the effects of general relativity predicted by Einstein, in the movement of a star passing into the intense gravitational field of Sagittarius A * , a massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

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.

SPIRou, the new planet-hunting spectropolarimeter developed for the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), has successfully recorded its first starlight. Ten years after it was first designed and following four intensive months of installation at CFHT, this international instrument in which France has played a leading role is on the point of initiating its scientific operations, namely the detection of exoplanets around nearby red dwarf stars and the study of newborn stars and planets.

Asteroid 2015 BZ509 is the very first object in the Solar System shown to have an extrasolar origin. This remarkable discovery was made by CNRS researcher Fathi Namouni and her Brazilian colleague Helena Morais, and is published on 21 May 2018 in MNRAS . Could some bodies in our Solar System come from the vicinity of other stars' Astronomers are in disagreement about comets, with some arguing that certain comets may have formed around other stars before being captured by the Sun, although they have never been able to prove it.

An international team led by researchers at CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has challenged currently held ideas about star formation. The unprecedented resolution of the observations obtained using the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) enabled them to measure the quantity of high-mass star-forming cores in a remote, very active region of our Galaxy, and show that there is a higher proportion of them there than expected.

The HESS international collaboration, to which CNRS and CEA contribute, has published the results of fifteen years of gamma ray observations of the Milky Way. Its telescopes installed in Namibia have studied populations of pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants, as well as microquasars, never before detected in gamma rays.

Comets made up of two lobes, such as Chury, visited by the Rosetta spacecraft, are produced when the debris resulting from a destructive collision between two comets clumps together again.

Through a quirk of nature called "gravitational lensing," a natural lens in space amplified a very distant star's light. Astronomers using Hubble took advantage of this phenomenon to pinpoint the faraway star and set a new distance record for the farthest individual star ever seen. They also used the distant star to test one theory of dark matter, and to probe the make-up of a galaxy cluster.

MUSE spectrograph reveals that nearly the entire sky in the early Universe is glowing with Lyman-alpha emission Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite sensitivity of MUSE allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the early Universe - revealing that almost the whole night sky is invisibly aglow.

PicSat will be launched into Earth orbit on 12 January 2018 to study the star Beta Pictoris, its exoplanet and its famous debris disk, thanks to a small telescope 5 cm in diameter.