news 2022

WEAVE has carried out its first-light observations on Stephan's Quintet, a group of five galaxies, some of which are undergoing collision. They provide a demonstration of its exceptional capabilities and hold out the promise of major discoveries. WEAVE, a new spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope (Canary Islands, Spain), has successfully carried out first-light observations of a group of five galaxies called Stephan's Quintet, thus demonstrating its unprecedented capabilities and providing the astronomical community with the promise of many new discoveries.

For the first time in over a decade, scientists from the CNRS and the Institut de radioastronomie millimétrique 1 , together with international colleagues, have observed a tidal disruption event (TDE

Hipparchus' star catalog is the earliest known attempt to accurately determine the positions of fixed stars. Researchers have just found fragments of this missing text in an old manuscript. They show that Hipparchus' data were significantly more accurate than those of another catalog composed centuries later.

They prove that Hipparchus' data were significantly more accurate than those of another catalogue composed centuries later. Researchers from the CNRS, Sorbonne Université and Tyndale House (affiliated with the University of Cambridge) have recently found fragments of the Star Catalogue composed by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus during the 2nd century BC.

The James Webb telescope has delivered extraordinary new images of the Orion Nebula. Many stars are born in this nebula, hence these observations could yield information on the origins of our Solar system. The new images were obtained by a team headed by French and Canadian researchers. An international research team has released the first images of the Orion Nebula, the closest richly productive stellar nursery to our own solar system.

On February 21, 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars. In October 1 , the rover confirmed the importance of its landing site, showing that Jezero Crater really was the site of a lake 3.6 billion years ago. Perseverance's geological discoveries in the crater's floor are described in four papers published on August 25, 2022 in Science and Science Advances .

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST is designed to answer outstanding questions about our origins: from the formation of stars and planets to the birth of the first galaxies in the early Universe. JWST was built by an international partnership between NASA, ESA, and CSA.

Within the EHT collaboration, the CNRS and IRAM participated in the creation of a first image of the black hole Sagittarius A*. Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies.

For the past thirty years, the star - 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.

Using a microphone developed in France, the Perseverance rover has recorded the first ever sounds from Mars audible to the human ear. By analysing these sounds, scientists have been able to find out more about the physical characteristics of the Martian atmosphere, and in particular about the speed of sound and its attenuation there.

Publication of the CRAL in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on Fabruary 8, 2022. CNRS-INSU communication on February 14, 2022. Context . Extreme adaptive optics systems, such as the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch facility (SPHERE), push forward the limits in high contrast and high resolution in direct imaging.

Many mountain populations-in the Andes or Himalayas, for example-rely on glaciers for their water. Yet changes in glacial water reserves, like predictions of sea level rise, greatly depend on glacier volume and thickness, both of which have been poorly evaluated-until now. By analysing over 800,000 pairs of satellite images, researchers from the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes (France), 1 and Dartmouth College (USA) have established the first global map of flow velocities for 98% (>200,000) of the world's glaciers.

The temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, a remnant of the energy unleashed by the Big Bang, has for the first time been measured at a very early stage in the history of the Universe, a mere 880 million years after it first formed. This remarkable result was achieved by an international group of astrophysicists who used NOEMA to observe a massive starburst galaxy, HFLS3, which was active at that time in cosmic history.

In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, two scientists - Chloé Michaut from Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon 1 and Jerome A. Neufeld from University of Cambridge 2 , propose a new model of crystallization of the lunar magma ocean where the crystals remain suspended in the lunar interior and the formation of the crust only begins once a critical crystal content is reached.

98.5% of the Sun is made up of two light chemical elements, hydrogen and helium, while the remaining 1.5% consists of other heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, and iron. The abundance of these heavier elements in a star is called its 'metallicity', and varies from star to star. It now turns out that our Galaxy is home to a stellar structure uniquely made of stars with extremely low metallicity, with a heavy element content 2,500 times lower than that of the Sun.