news 2021

Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, has not been disproven once in over a century, despite relentless efforts from scientists to find its faults. Pulsars are stars toward the end of the stellar life cycle, emitting radio waves that sweep through space like a lighthouse: they can be detected by radio telescopes in the form of highly regular flashes.

Images from Perseverance's French-American instrument SuperCam show that the crater where the rover landed once contained a lake. The SuperCam observations also identified strata containing boulders, related to a major change in the hydrological regime. This study, led by a French researcher, will facilitate selection of the most suitable areas for Perseverance to collect samples.

There was a surprise in store for NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it prepared to land on asteroid Bennu in October 2020 in order to collect samples. Contrary to what astronomers believed, the asteroid's surface was not covered with a layer of fine dust, called regolith. This dust, which blankets the Moon and some asteroids, is formed when thermal shock and meteorite impacts break up surface rocks.

CRAL publication in MNRAS , on September 16, 2021. CNRS press release on September 16, 2021. Galaxies can receive and exchange matter with their external environment thanks to the galactic winds created by stellar explosions. Thanks to the MUSE instrument  from the Very Large Telescope at the ESO, an international research team, led on the French side by the CNRS and l'Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 , has mapped a galactic wind for the first time.

Publication of LGL-TPE in Science on October 7, 2021. CNRS press release on October 7, 2021. The Perseverance rover has now confirmed the suitability of its landing site: Jezero crater really did contain a lake, into which a river flowed through a delta 3.6 billion years ago. Led by a CNRS researcher, the international team involved scientists in France from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier , and published its findings on October 7 in Science.

Using information obtained from around a dozen earthquakes detected on Mars by the Very Broad Band SEIS seismometer, developed in France, the international team of NASA's InSight mission has unveiled the internal structure of Mars.

Gravitational wave detectors have observed a new type of cataclysmic event in the cosmos: the merger of a neutron star with a black hole. The phenomenon was detected twice in January 2020. Several hypotheses could explain the existence of such mixed pairs. Further observations will be needed in order to settle the question.

Studying how liquid foams evolve over time is difficult, if not impossible, on Earth because of gravity. The FOAM-C experiment, which began in 2020, was designed to study liquid foams in zero gravity on board the ISS. New samples will be set up by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet on Friday, June 11. The FOAM-C experiment studies the properties of liquid foams in zero gravity.

Every year, our planet encounters dust from comets 1 and asteroid 2 . These interplanetary dust particles pass through our atmosphere and give rise to shooting stars. Some of them reach the ground in the form of micrometeorites. An international program 3 conducted for nearly 20 years by scientists from the CNRS, the Université Paris-Saclay and the National museum of natural history 4 with the support of the French polar institute, has determined that 5,200 tons per year of these micrometeorites reach the ground.

Within the EHT collaboration, the CNRS and IRAM participated in the creation of a new image of the black hole in the M87 galaxy. Produced in so-called "polarized" light, this image makes it possible to observe the magnetic field and to better understand the physics around black holes. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole , has revealed today a new view of the massive object at the centre of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarised light.

The MUSE instrument on the Very Large Telescope has captured an image of several filaments in the early Universe.. .. revealing the unexpected presence of billions of dwarf galaxies in the filaments Although the filaments of gas in which galaxies are born have long been predicted by cosmological models, we have so far had no real images of such objects.

Follow along live as the Perseverance rover lands on Mars, thanks to the SuperCam instrument on board which was co-developed by three research laboratories under the supervision of Sorbonne University. On Thursday, February 18, 2021, a little before 10:00 pm, the Perseverance rover will descend on Mars at more than 21,000 km/h.

The SKA Observatory will design and build the most sensitive radio astronomy instrument ever created, operating over an unmatched radio-wave range. It is expected to study the formation of the very first stars and galaxies shortly after the Big Bang. SKA will produce a data stream that exceeds today's global internet traffic and Facebook's current storage needs.

A research team led by scientists from IRAP (CNRS/CNES/Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier) and IPAG (CNRS/UGA) 1 has for the first time measured the internal density of a very young exoplanet orbiting a newly formed, extremely active star. Despite the 'noise' generated by the star's activity, they successfully achieved this using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT)'s planet hunting instrument SPIRou.

Skip to main page Skip to contain Skip to sitemap Skip to search Skip to accessibility Skip to contact Skip to legal notice Publication of CRAL in Nature Astronomy on January 11, 2021. Feedback-driven winds from star formation or active galactic nuclei might be a relevant channel for the abrupt quenching of star formation in massive galaxies.

Two scientists from CNRS and Sorbonne University working at the Institute of Celestial Mechanics and Ephemeris Calculation (Paris Observatory - PSL/CNRS) have just shown that the influence of Saturn's satellites can explain the tilt of the rotation axis of the gas giant. Rather like David versus Goliath, it appears that Saturn's tilt may in fact be caused by its moons.