Astrochemistry and Origins

Interstellar Matter and Cosmology

Stellar and Solar Physics

Solar and Planetary Systems

Latest News

5 days 23 hours ago

How many earth-like planets orbit the habitable zone of solar-like stars? How planets form and evolve in their planetary systems? What about the interaction with their stars? These are among the questions the ESA PLATO mission is called to answer, through exquisite measurements of exoPLAnet Transits and Oscillations of stars (you now know the origin of the PLATO acronym). The “transit” measurements yield information on the size of the planets, while the “stellar oscillations” give us the mass and age of the stars, which in turn are fundamental to assess the mass and age of the hosted planets. The exquisite quality of all such measurements is secured by 26 ultra large field-of-view cameras that make the eyes of the PLATO mission.

3 weeks 17 hours ago

An international team, involving scientists from IAS, IRAP, ISMO and LERMA, has shed light on the destruction and reformation of a large quantity of water in the planet-forming disk “d203-506” located at the heart of the Orion Nebula. This discovery was made possible by an original multidisciplinary approach that combines observations from the JWST space telescope and quantum physics calculations. The study, carried out as a part of the PDRs4All¹ Early Release Science (ERS) program and led by Marion Zannese, a PhD student at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, has been published in Nature Astronomy.

3 months 6 days ago

During 2023, IAS was able to test 3 Flight cameras (PFM, FM4, FM5) at the Calibration Station. The last camera was finished testing in the second week of December. All of the tests of these cameras took a little over 6 months, during which thermal vacuum tests were carried out as well as scientific performance tests. A team of about twenty people from IAS and the Station worked to enable these tests. Congratulations to all for this major achievement!

4 months 1 week ago

In December 2020, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back to Earth 5.4 grams of samples from the primitive asteroid Ryugu. These grains were collected in two locations, with one collection after an artificial impact that excavated subsurface material. The entire collection is being analysed at JAXA’s Curation Facility (Sagamihara, Japan), under a controlled atmosphere to prevent contamination of the samples by the terrestrial atmosphere.

Pages

Subscribe to Syndicate