News 2019

Nov 26, 2019
Dense molecular filaments are the cradles of stars

An international team led by the Astrophysics Department-AIM Laboratory of CEA-Irfu has just obtained new clues about the origin of star mass distribution, combining observational data from the large interferometer ALMA and the APEX radio telescope operated by the European Austral Observatory (ESO) and the Herschel Space Observatory. Thanks to ALMA, the researchers have discovered in the so-called Cat's Paw Nebula, located at about 5,500 light-years, the presence of protostellar dense cores much more massive than those observed in the solar vicinity. Researchers have shown that there is a close link between the mass distribution of interstellar filaments and the mass distribution of stars. The density - or mass per unit length - of the parent filaments is the crucial parameter that controls the masses of newly-formed stars. This discovery provides a key clue to the origin of stellar masses. These results are published in three articles of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Dec 04, 2019
The hot heart of the SN 1987A supernova

An international team, led by astronomers from Cardiff University, with the contribution of the Astrophysics Department of CEA-Irfu, may have spotted for the first time the compact remains of the last star explosion visible by eye that occurred on February 23, 1987 in a nearby galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, only 160 000 light-years away.
Using the high-resolution images of the ALMA radio telescope in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the team discovered a small area of dust, warmer than its environment, which may correspond to the supposed location of the compact neutron star that should have formed during the explosion according to theoretical models. This compact object had been searched without success for more than 30 years. This indirect discovery nevertheless requires to be confirmed by additional data. These results are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Nov 26, 2019
Dense molecular filaments are the cradles of stars

An international team led by the Astrophysics Department-AIM Laboratory of CEA-Irfu has just obtained new clues about the origin of star mass distribution, combining observational data from the large interferometer ALMA and the APEX radio telescope operated by the European Austral Observatory (ESO) and the Herschel Space Observatory. Thanks to ALMA, the researchers have discovered in the so-called Cat's Paw Nebula, located at about 5,500 light-years, the presence of protostellar dense cores much more massive than those observed in the solar vicinity. Researchers have shown that there is a close link between the mass distribution of interstellar filaments and the mass distribution of stars. The density - or mass per unit length - of the parent filaments is the crucial parameter that controls the masses of newly-formed stars. This discovery provides a key clue to the origin of stellar masses. These results are published in three articles of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Oct 07, 2019

Lisa Bugnet is one of 35 young women researchers who won the L'Oréal-Unesco Fellowships for Women in Science in 2019. As an asteroseismologist at the Dynamic Laboratory of Stars, (Exo)planets and their Environment of the DAP/Irfu, she uses seismic waves emitted by stars to probe their heart and understand their evolution from birth to the end of their life.

Jan 27, 2019

An international collaboration, involving the Astrophysics Department-Laboratory AIM of CEA irfu, participated in the study of an exoplanetary system, Kepler-107 and revealed an amazing distribution of its 4 planets of which two seem potentially resulting from a giant impact. Thanks to asteroseismology (the study of star vibrations) and the modeling of planetary transits, researchers have been able to determine the mass and radius of the central star and its planets with great precision. and highlighted the unusual density of one of the planets. This anomaly can be explained by a giant collision between planets, probably similar to the one that affected the Earth in the past to form the Moon. These results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy of Februrary 4th, 2019.

Oct 06, 2019
Optical follow-up of gravitionnal waves

The first results of the space mission SVOM (for Space-based multi-band astronomical Variable Objects Monitor) have just fallen before the launch scheduled for the end of 2021. How is this possible? Quite simply because this ambitious Franco-Chinese mission, which aims at studying gamma-ray bursts of the Universe, is also developing a network of ground-based cameras able to detect the emission of visible light that follows the outbreak of these bursts, the most violent known explosions. This network, dubbed Ground-based Wide Angle Camera (GWAC), is already in operation at the Xinglong Observatory in Northeast Beijing (China). Its test version, dubbed Mini-GWAC, successfully concluded a first campaign of monitoring and real-time follow-up of gravitational wave sources discovered by the LIGO (USA) and Virgo (Italy) facilities. These results are being published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Jan 21, 2019

On November 29, 2018, the first version of the ECU software for the ECLAIRs instrument was delivered.
This computer, called Gamma Camera Management and Scientific Processing Unit, will be set on the Franco-Chinese SVOM satellite, designed to study gamma-ray bursts. It will allow the management of the ECLAIRs instrument and the detection of gamma-ray bursts by the SVOM mission in real time on board. This software, under the scientific responsibility of the DAp, is produced in strong collaboration between the DAp and the DEDIP within the IRFU.

 

Nov 20, 2019

After a decade-long search, scientists have for the first time detected a gamma-ray burst in very-high-energy gamma light. This discovery was made in July 2018 by the H.E.S.S. collaboration using the  huge 28-m telescope of the H.E.S.S. array in Namibia. Surprisingly, this Gamma-ray burst, an extremely energetic flash following a cosmological cataclysm, was found to emit very-high-energy gamma-rays long after the initial explosion. This discovery was published in Nature.

 

 

Jun 30, 2019
A second life for the CEA VISIR camera

The first comprehensive planetary search campaign around the nearest star Alpha Centauri A has just been performed on the VLT telescope of the Southern European Observatory (ESO) using the NEAR infrared instrument (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region). Based on the VISIR infrared camera built under the coordination of the Astrophysics Department of CEA-Irfu and in service at ESO since 2004, the NEAR instrument is designed to detect planets with the Earth's mass and above. A first campaign of more than 100 hours of observations over 10 days has just ended with the contribution of the researchers of the Astrophysics Department of CEA-Irfu, in order to obtain the first direct image of a potential rocky exoplanet located in the habitable zone, conducive to life.

 

Retour en haut