Artist's view of an X-ray pulsar in a close binary system like the INTEGRAL source IGR J0029+5934. (Credit: NASA/Dana Berry)
Compact objects (black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs) play a major role in modern astrophysics. They are associated with the most exotic environments and violent phenomena of the Universe. Surrounded by extremely powerful gravitational and magnetic fields, they appear as luminous X-ray or gamma-ray sources, thus allowing scientists to explore certain physical processes under conditions that cannot be obtained in laboratories.
Astrophysicists involved in the study of compact objects focus on a number of key issues: the validity of the theory of gravitation in strong fields, the physical phenomena associated to the accretion of matter and to the emission of relativistic jets, the nature of particle acceleration in extreme magnetic fields, nucleosynthesis processes of supernovae, the formation and evolution of black holes.
last update : 10-18 00:00:00-2005 (608)
 | A change of colour, 2000 years ago ? Sirius is the brightest star of the sky, twice as bright as the second star Canopus. At a distance of 8,6 light years from the Sun, it is also one of the closest stars. With a temperature of 10 000 degrees, it is a very blue star and its luminosity ... More » |
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27-05-2010
Molecular clouds reveal a giant outburst of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Galaxy
The central black hole of the Galaxy, today surprisingly quiet, has undergone, several hundred years ago, a violent phase of activity. This is the conclusion reached by an international team led by astrophysicists of the APC laboratory and ... More » |
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10-01-2008
INTEGRAL discovers a factory of positrons in the Milky Way (10 January 2008)
Surprisingly, an asymmetry in the distribution of antimatter in the central regions of our Galaxy has just been discovered. By adding all scientific data acquired since five years by the spectrometer SPI aboard the INTEGRAL satellite, a European ... More » |
Experiments
