Adoption of the PLATO mission by ESA
The PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) planetary mission proposal aims to discover rocky planets around nearby stars similar to our Sun. Selected by ESA in 2014, the mission […]
News
Rosetta unveils the secrets of the origin of xenon
The existence of a link between the terrestrial xenon isotopic composition and that of comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko has just been demonstrated by an international consortium of researchers1 including those of […]
Delivery of the PAS French instrument for the Solar Orbiter mission
The PAS (Proton-Alfa Sensor) sensor, designed and developed by the IRAP teams (CNRS / CNES / Paul Sabatier University), will be delivered to ESA on 13 June 2017 to equip […]
An update to the largest catalogue of X-ray detected astrophysical objects
The first of June sees the seventh data release of the XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue (3XMM-DR7), the largest catalogue of X-ray sources ever created. This new version includes 727790 X-ray […]
Astrophysicists from Toulouse have studied the “rejuvenating” pulsar in a neighboring galaxy
French scientists published the results of a study of the unique ultra-slow pulsar XB091D. This neutron star is believed to have captured a companion only a million years ago and […]
Pilot experiment : the interstellar dust studied from a balloon
The Pilot astrophysics experiment will be launched in a few days under a stratospheric balloon from Alice Springs in central Australia. The aim is to observe the polarization of the […]
The “Tchouri” comet took several million years to form
The heating produced by the disintegration of isotopes of aluminum and iron potentially present in the 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet would have been too intense at the beginning of the […]
Solid state convection and mixing of the Martian mantle before complete solidification of its magmatic ocean
An international team of researchers including an IRAP researcher (Paul Sabatier University of Toulouse and CNRS) publishes the results of a study devoted to the early thermo-chemical evolution of the […]
New clues about the appearance of the first stars in the Universe
When and how did the first stars appear in the Universe and how did the galaxies form? Astronomers try to answer these questions by directly observing the childhood of the […]