Institut de Recherche sur les Lois Fondamentales de l'Univers

An international collaboration of astrophysicists, led by Martin Kilbinger from the Astrophysics Division - AIM Laboratory AIM at CEA Saclay-Irfu and the Institute of Astrophysics Paris, has obtained the largest survey of galaxy images that are deformed by gravitation. More than 4.2 million ... More »

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) Council at its meeting at ESO's Headquarters in Garching, Germany on 4 December 2012 has given full approval for the start of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) programme. With its 39,3 m diametre mirror, E-ELT will be the world largest ... More »

Two scientists from the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis - Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and from the Université Paris Diderot and CEA, have just proposed the first model to explain the origin of most of the regular satellites in our solar system. First proposed in ... More »

An international team of astrophysicists, including Samar Safi-Harb and Gilles Ferrand at the University of Manitoba (Canada) and Anne Decourchelle from the Astrophysical Department-AIM Laboratory (CEA Saclay - France), has produced the first 3D simulations of supernova remnants (SNRs) showing ... More »

Using the European X-ray astronomy satellite XMM-Newton [1], researchers from CNRS [2] and CEA [3] have discovered a new source of cosmic rays. In the vicinity of the remarkable Arches cluster, near the center of the Milky Way, these particles are accelerated in the shock wave generated by tens ... More »

A team led by Philippe André du Service d'Astrophysique-Laboratoire AIM du CEA-Irfu has just uncovered the very first stage of the formation  of a brown dwarf, one of these tiny stars with a mass just above the planets. Several hundreds brown dwarfs have already been detected in ... More »

Sporadic ejections of matter are observed in the form of radio jets from supermassive black holes in active galaxies as well as from galactic binary systems hosting a black hole of several solar masses. Do these observations indicate that jet formation is a universal property of black holes, ... More »

The explosive death of massive stars begins with the collapse of their iron core which gives birth to a neutron star. Despite spherical initial conditions, this explosion can kick the neutron star several hundred kilometers per second. Exclusively studied by numerical simulations so far, the ... More »

Thanks to the data of the NASA  Kepler satellite, an international team including Rafael Garcia of the Astrophysical Department at CEA-Irfu [1], succesfully probe the heart of hundreds of giant stars for the first time. The researchers used stellar seismology to analyze very small ... More »

Prototype of the X-ray binary systems harboring a black hole, Cygnus X-1 is the subject of many studies since its discovery in the 1960s. By studying its behavior at high energy, an international team led by Philippe Laurent, astrophysicist at the Service d'Astrophysique of the CEA-Irfu and ... More »

Waves traveling inside the core of a giant star have been discovered by a international team of researchers including Rafael A. Garcia, member of the Service d'Astrophysique of CEA-Irfu [1]. The results were obtained using 320-day observations  of the Kepler satellite by means of stellar ... More »

An international team, including scientists from the Astrophysics Department-AIM and the Particle Physics Department of CEA-Irfu, has just used the Planck satellite to discover galaxy clusters with characteristics that were previously unknown. These clusters, which contain up to a thousand ... More »

The scientific community had to wait 18 months for the data collected by Planck, the European Space Agency satellite. Now, the first scientific results are in. The first edition of the compact sources catalog (ERCSC, Early Release Compact Sources Catalogue), with several thousand sources detected ... More »

A major international collaboration [1], involving researchers from the CEA-IRFU Astrophysics Department, CEA-IRAMIS and CEA-DAM, has succeeded in measuring for the first time the effects of light absorption by nickel in high temperature plasmas similar to those found around Cepheid-type variable ... More »

Scientists from the Astrophysical Department of the CEA-Irfu and the Bonn University (Germany) have shown that stable magnetic fields may form in the non-convective regions of the stars such as the external layers of stars more massive than the Sun as well as in the centre of solar-type stars. In ... More »

An international team of astronomers, including several French researchers, has just completed a precise measurement of the distance to five distant galaxies using the ESA Herschel Space Observatory together with ground-based data from the interferometer operated by the Institute for Millimetric ... More »

Magnetars form a class of neutron stars with a much higher (100-1000 times) magnetic field with respect to common rotation powered pulsars. This extreme magnetic field is currently believed to be the cause of their unpredictable and intense activity. But the observation by an international team, ... More »

‘High-resolution’ numerical simulations carried out by scientists at the Astrophysics Department of the CEA-Irfu/AIM  have just revealed that the most famous galactic collision ever, the Antennae collision, produces far more stars than observations suggested. When two galaxies ... More »

An international team of astronomers/astrophysicists that includes a member of the Service d'Astrophysique  (CEA-Irfu,  Saclay) has obtained new data of the spectacular surroundings of the famous supernova SN 1987A using the recently refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. New spectroscopic ... More »

An international team[1] led by a CEA astrophysicist of the AIM Laboratory- Astrophysics Department of the CEA-Irfu has observed, for the first time, the cycle of magnetic activity in a star using stellar seismology - the study of vibrations in a star.  The observations of HD49933 by ... More »

An international team led by astrophysicists from the Lyon Observatory (CRAL, CNRS/INSU, Université Lyon 1) and the AIM laboratory (CEA-Irfu, CNRS, Université Paris 7) has just shed some light on the origins of the giant gas ring in Leo.  The astrophysicists were able to detect ... More »

Numerical simulations peformed by a group of astrophysicists of the  AIM-CEA Saclay Laboratory  (University Paris Diderot, CEA, CNRS) and the Nice observatory, based on images collected by the Cassini mission, show that some tiny moons of Saturn are still forming now from material of the ... More »

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 including scientists of the Service d'Astrophysique ... More »

An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Masato Onodera at the Astrophysical Department of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France [1] has used the Subaru Telescope [2] to take an infrared spectra of a very distant, extremely bright, massive elliptical galaxy. This galaxy is 10 ... More »

The Astrophysics Department of CEA-Irfu, which has scientific and technical responsibility for the MIRIM imager (Mid Infrared Imager) on the MIRI spectro-imager, one of the major instruments of the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has just delivered the final model of the ... More »

Following its launch on 14 May 2009, the Planck satellite [1] has been continually observing the celestial vault and has mapped the entire sky since 13 August to obtain the first very high resolution image of the dawn of the universe. The Planck satellite has just finished its first sky coverage. ... More »

The space mission KEPLER, launched in March 2009 to investigate exoplanets, has just delivered its first results on the vibrations of stars. Several international teams of scientists, including members of the Astrophysics Division (CEA-Irfu) have shown, using this first data, that starquakes ... More »

For the first time, the events following the explosion of a star have now been simulated in three dimensions by a team from the Astrophysics Division of CEA-IRFU. The simulation includes the significant contribution of particles accelerated by the shock that is produced in the expansion. ... More »

The first scientific images of the Herschel Space telescope  have just been released during a scientific conference held at Madrid (Spain) on 17 and 18 decembre 2009, only six months after launch. One the most spectacular pictures is the image of a dark cloud in the Aquila constellation ... More »

For the first time, the high-energy gamma rays emitted by a microquasar have been spotted with certainty, thanks to NASA's Fermi telescope. The observation of the microquasar Cygnus X-3 by a French team (CEA-IRFU, CNRS-INSU and IN2P3, University of Paris Diderot, Joseph Fourier University) ... More »

A spectacular document relating to the history of astronomy is brought back to light by a recent study from a group of scholars led by Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud from the CEA Astrophysical Department [1]. The document, called the Dunhuang chart, now kept at the British Library in London, is a complete ... More »

The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope  [1] has detected the most violent gamma-ray burst ever recorded; a gigantic explosion marking the death of a massive star. Light from this explosion, captured by the Fermi observatory on September 16th 2008, had taken 12.2 billion years to reach Earth. ... More »

Jean-Luc Starck, an experienced research scientist at IRFU (the CEA Institute for Research on the Fundamental Laws of the Universe) was awarded a 2.2 million euro grant spread over five years under the 7th European research and development framework programme (FP7). The grant comes in recognition ... More »

Neutron stars are the most magnetized objects in our Universe. Some of them, dubbed "Magnetars" have a record magnetic field of 1011 Tesla (T), which corresponds to one million of billions times that of the Sun during a quiescent phase. It's around this class of objects that an ... More »

Sirius, the brightest star of the sky, is reported to have shown a change of colour, a possibility that has led some scientists to suspect a possible but yet undetected small companion. Now using a specific mask and the modern technique of adaptive optics which allows to suppress most of the ... More »

The realization of MIRIM-OB, the optical bench of MIRI (Mid Infra Red Imager), one of the four instruments which will equip the forthcoming space telescope JWST has just completed an essential step with the demonstration that it fulfills the various and rigorous constraints imposed by its use in ... More »

A innovative hard X-ray camera X with excellent performances has been realized and tested at CEA. Result of three years of studies, this ultra-compact camera, called Caliste 64, is able to detect photons between 2 and 250 keV and therefore fills a gap between two domains, the low X-ray  and ... More »

An international team of astronomers lead by scientists of the Astrophysics Division of CEA-IRFU has discovered large molecular gas reservoirs - the combustible for forming new stars - hosted in ordinary massive galaxies in the young, distant Universe. The discovery has been made with the IRAM ... More »

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 research group, including scientists from the Service ... More »

The high resolution images provided by the Cassini spacecraft have uncovered a surprising shape for two small Saturn satellites located inside the rings of the giant planet. An international team, leaded by Sébastien Charnoz and André Brahic from the Service d'Astrophysique (SAp) of ... More »

What is a galaxy ? Stars, gas, some dust and surrounding them an invisible dark matter halo. The discovery a few years ago of a so-called « dark galaxy »  devoid of its most famous component - the stars - raised a lot of interest in the public and among astrophysicists puzzled by a ... More »

The first Astronomical image taken by a new generation of camera called "ArTeMiS-1" were obtained with the APEX telescope in March 2007, at Chajnantor in Chile. This bolometer camera operates in the "submillimetre" domain, between the infrared and the millimetre waves, ... More »

A team of European, Japanese and Chinese astronomers, led by A. Pastorello from the Astrophyical Research Centre at Belfast University and including French scientists from the Paris Institute for Astrophysics (IAP) and the Service d'Astrophysique (SAp) at the French Atomic Commision (CEA), ... More »

Many small galaxies called "dwarf galaxies" are found orbiting massive galaxies like our Milky Way. They all contain less than one billion stars, hundred time less than the massive galaxies. Where do these tiny galaxies come from ? In standard cosmological scenarios, they are assumed ... More »

  The first images from a new generation camera called "ArTeMiS-1"  have just been obtained at theGornergrat Observatory, near Zermatt in Switzerland. This camera operates in the still poorly known "sub-millimetre" domain, between the infrared and the millimetre ... More »

As it travels near matter concentrations, visible or dark, light does not travel in a straight line. It is instead deflected by gravity, as if it went through a lens. This effect, known as "gravitational lensing", is predicted by the theory of General Relativity and is currently ... More »

An international collaboration led by two French astronomers, Martine Mouchet from the Paris-Meudon Observatory and Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud from the Astrophysical Department of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), have just uncovered a very peculiar abundance of carbon, nitrogen and ... More »

What is the origin of the cosmic diffuse infrared background ? A study, based on observations by the ISO infrared satellite, brings today a essential answer to this very important astrophysical question. With the help of deep sky images, obtained at the wavelength of 15 microns (medium infrared), ... More »

From 2002, January 23rd to February 6th, an international team has fulfilled a very important calibration campaign on the whole INTEGRAL payload, in one of the clean room of ESA/ESTEC (The Netherlands). The satellite was in its in-flight configuration, with the FM model of the two gamma-ray ... More »

A team of astronomers from the Service d'Astrophysique du DAPNIA/CEA, in collaboration with scientists of the Padoue Observatory and of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered in a cluster of galaxies an activity of star formation with an intensity which was unsuspected in such an ... More »

On 12th July 2001, a révolutionary camera was delivered to Milano (Italy) by the Service d'Astrophysique of CEA to be integrated in the IBIS telescope. IBIS is one of the two main instruments of the INTEGRAL gamma-rays observatory. This European Space Agency (E.S.A.) satellite will be ... More »