ESA unveils the first Solar Orbiter images
The first images taken by Solar Orbiter, ESA’s new solar exploration probe, have just been unveiled by the European Space Agency. Solar Orbiter completed its “flight test” phase in mid-June […]
News
The TAROT telescopes in the GRANDMA network to characterize the sources of gravitational waves
A new era of physics opened in 2015 with the detection of gravitational waves generated by the merging of black holes or neutron stars. The 2019-2020 gravitational wave detection campaign […]
PERSEVERANCE ROVER READY TO TAKE OFF TOWARDS MARS
On Tuesday 30 June 2020, Jean-Yves Le Gall, President of the CNES, and Antoine Petit, President and CEO of the CNRS, together presented the challenges of NASA’s “Mars 2020” mission, […]
One step closer into the heart of the X-IFU
A new video about the spectrometer X-IFU (X-ray Integral Field Unit) is now available. You will discover the heart of the instrument: its X-ray detection chain. The spectrometer X-IFU is […]
France delivers the NISP infrared spectrophotometer for the European space mission Euclid
After more than 10 years of design, manufacturing and testing, the Near Infrared SpectroPhotometer (NISP) was delivered to ESA on Monday 19 May 2020. It will be installed at the […]
Inequalities faced by women in access to permanent positions in astronomy in France
A recent national survey conducted by Olivier Berné and Alexia Hilaire of IRAP (Université Paul Sabatier de Toulouse and CNRS) on behalf of the Société Française d’Astronomie et d’Astrophysique (French […]
Hubble finds best evidence for elusive mid-size black hole
New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have provided the strongest evidence yet for mid-sized black holes in the Universe. Hubble confirms that this “intermediate-mass” black hole dwells inside […]
France on Mars aboard NASA’s Perseverance Rover
NASA’s next Mars rover has a new name: “Perseverance”. This name is reminiscent of its wheeled predecessors: Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. Long live Perseverance, which will be launched this […]
Multiple rings in protoplanetary disks: one planet to govern them all
Recent observations of protoplanetary disks, these planetary systems in formation, frequently reveal sequences of dark and bright rings. While these structures are often attributed to multiple planets, numerical simulations show […]